Kiran Desai returns to Booker longlist with new novel after 19 years

Business Standard

5 days ago

Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai on Tuesday returned to the coveted literary award longlist with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny', a novel described by the judges as a vast and immersive tale about a pair of young Indians in America.
The 53-year-old Delhi-born author, who won the Booker Prize 19 years ago in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss', joins 12 writers from around the world for the so-called Booker Dozen of 13 books that will be whittled down to six shortlisted titles by September.
Desai's latest novel stands out as the longest on the longlist, weighing in at 667 pages and published by Hamish Hamilton. The shortest is "Universality" by Natasha Brown at 156 pages.
"She has spent almost 20 years writing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny'. Should she win this year, she would become the fifth double winner in the prize's 56-year history, Booker Prize Foundation said in a statement.
Desai has a family history with the prize: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times, it noted.
According to the Booker Prize website, the novel follows the lives of Sonia and Sunny, two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.
The 2025 prize longlist was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrating the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
"The 13 longlisted novels bring the reader to Hungary, Albania, the north of England, Malaysia, Ukraine, Korea, London, New York, Trinidad and Greece, India and the West Country, said Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize 2025 Chair of Judges.
"There are short novels and some very long ones. There are novels that experiment with form and others that do so less obviously. Some of them examine the past and others poke at our shaky present. They are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises. All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent, he said.
Other works in the race to be shortlisted include Trinidadian author Claire Adam's Love Forms', Malaysian Tash Aw's The South', Canadian-Ukrainian Maria Reva's Ending', Hungarian-British David Szalay's Flesh' and Albanian-American Ledia Xhoga's Misinterpretation'.
Four British authors in the running are: Natasha Brown with Universality', Jonathan Buckley with One Boat', Andrew Miller with The Land in Winter' and Benjamin Wood with Seascraper'. And, the three American authors completing the longlist include Susan Choi with Flashlight', Katie Kitamura with Audition' and Ben Markovits with The Rest of Our Lives'.
"The stories are set all over the world, and as we looked through the books we began to notice that their authors, all of them writing in English, had come from many different places too It's the highest number of different nationalities we've seen on a Booker Prize longlist for a decade yet British writers are strongly represented too, said Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation.
"Oh wow! Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize 19 years after The Inheritance of Loss won. What a staggering return! (Out in September!)" Manasi Subramanian, editor-in-chief and vice-president at Penguin Random House India, which overlooks the Hamish Hamilton imprint, wrote on social media.
For the first time, the shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall in London on September 23.
The winning book for 2025 will be announced on November 10 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, with the winner receiving GBP 50,000 (approx Rs 58 lakh). The six shortlisted authors will each receive GBP 2,500 (approx Rs 2.90 lakh) and a specially bound edition of their book.