Reviewing Shelf

Kiran Desai

My View:

A book set in Delhi?
About love?
Set in multiple cities and countries?
Sigh me up.

Almost 700 pages?!! Okay, that’s a problem. I don’t do tomes. Let me get an audio book. It’s 26 hours long 😭. It will go well with Diwali cleaning. Perfect timing.

I had been meaning to but never got around to reading the Booker winner The inheritance of loss. And I don’t even know how it’s been 19 years!!! Gosh, I’m old.

Anyhow I dived into this book, and the chores went by, along with the chapters.

The nostalgia of 90s India hit me. Reminiscent of childhood. No mobile phones, no laptops. Just the harsh ringing of the landline, and the click click click on a hefty computer’s keyboard.

A tale that starts with an all familiar loneliness in a strange, far away land and a yearning to do something about it as the family back home knows very well, the only cure for loneliness is marriage. And so it all begins.

Bit by tiny bit, you get glimpses into the households of Sonia and Sunny. The class differences, the spousal battles, the competition of whose cook is better, their individual romantic journeys of the past, the dilly-dallying of career dreams, and the ways their lives intersect.

The here and then gone romance, the coming together and then apart. Ah, I will not give out the spoilers.

But there’s so much to say. And feel. And talk about. The hiss of the sizzling kakoris, the divorced Mina Foi’s tumbled down world, the new beginnings for Seher, the German grandfather and his ghostly apparition of Badal Baba, the one that floats on a cloud and cannot be grasped unless in the shape of a ghost hound.

Did I lose you there? Oh, I get it. If I knew there was magical realism in here, I might have been skeptical to pick up this book. But there was so much more going on that I just went with the flow. And let myself be washed over by mysticism and believed what was happening.

The book is about ghosts in every character’s closet and the way everyone outside of them is the one who’s wrong. Ah, I’m having a field day with all those psychological character sketches. So rich, and diverse and fascinating. I wanted to sit each one down and ask them, “tell me your story”.

Delhi and its history and its people. I’m almost amazed at what Kiran Desai has built, considering how little time she spent in India but she has held onto the pulse of the people, and marked them by their South Delhi-ness. They are adequately branded and you can actually glimpse them in your mind’s eye.

And the feels I have felt for Sonia. The way I wanted to shake her up, to ask her to pick up the pieces, to find her self-respect, to give her my strength. This is when you know a book has done you in. When you can crawl under the skin of your characters, almost wanting to melt into them and correct their course of action before they go askew and take them with you.

Desai’s words constantly ask you to highlight sentences, to hold them close, to cherish them, and to share them with others, and say, “See, this is what I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t find the words.”

No wonder this book took 2 decades in the making, each word painstakingly gone over, and over again until it felt right.

And when I read reviews saying it could have been edited better, I think back to Desai’s interview of how she managed to bring down 5000 pages to 700. I cannot even imagine the insurmountable task!

Not to mention, the drama, that made the pages fly by, as you are shocked and the mysteries that don’t unfold, and you put them away, out of your mind.

Surprised by unlikely bonds that forge over the course of the book and have you gasping. Ah, I know what other readers meant when they went right back to reread this one. But I don’t consider myself upto that task. Yet.

I’m, however, thinking of preponing the Booker read. It’s been 19 years too late already.

4/5 stars – I really liked it.

Buy it here – Amazon India | Amazon US | The Book Depository | Flipkart | Add on Goodreads | Audible

Genre: Fiction

Date Published: September 23, 2025

Synopsis:

The spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

Behind every love story are the myriad stories of two families.

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.

Back in India, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love. 

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

About the Author

Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. She is the daughter of the noted author Anita Desai.

Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), gained accolades from notable figures including Salman Rushdie, and went on to receive the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.