Tag: Booker shortlist 2025

Booker shortlist review #2 – “The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny” by Kiran Desai

This was the longest of the books shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. At almost 700 pages it was nearly half as long again as the next biggest, Susan Choi’s Flashlight (464 pages). I do enjoy a long book – the longest ever Booker shortlisted novel was Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019), a book I loved and the stream of consciousness style of which suited its length. This book, I am not so sure.

The two main characters are Sonia and Sunny, Indian immigrants living in the United States. Sonia has recently graduated from college in Vermont. She wants to be a novelist but lacks motivation and application. At the start of the novel she is in a relationship with a much older man, an established and renowned artist who evades commitment and who exploits her youth, beauty and biddable nature. 

Sunny is the only child of a widowed mother, and is working as a journalist with the Associated Press in New York, dreaming of his big break but struggling to make an impact. He is in a long-term relationship with his American girlfriend, but when he meets her parents, the gulf between them and their respective cultures becomes clear. 

Sonia and Sunny’s family backgrounds are illustrated in detail and a powerful and rich canvas is painted by the author, drawing out the importance of tradition in Indian culture, but also the rapidity of change in that society. Sonia and Sunny’s grandparents, for example, are firmly in the past and struggle with the new realities whether this is in relation to public administration, marriage traditions or technology. Their parents’ generation straddles the past and the present and all are still trying to work out how to navigate the new realities. 

Sonia and Sunny represent the Indian dream, trying to establish themselves in the west, and make a career which matches their academic credentials but always rubbing up against hostile attitudes to immigrants and shaken by the culture clashes. They are first made aware of each other in the most traditional Indian way when Sonia’s grandfather approaches Sunny’s grandfather (a chess-playing companion) to try and arrange a meeting between the two. Sunny’s family goes through the motions of promising to introduce them whilst privately regarding the approach with contempt given the social gap between the two families.

It will be some time later that Sonia and Sunny meet in person, in India, for Sonia’s grandfather’s funeral. Will they strike up a romance, ironic, given their respective families’ attempt to match/eschew them? Or have they become far too American for such arrangements?

The real irony of the situation is expressed in the title of the book – both young people are lonely, in relationships of their own choosing which not only fail to fulfil them on either a romantic or a cultural level, but which verge on toxic. In the case of both of them, their partners cannot connect with their Indian cultural sensibilities, or even their immigrant sensibilities.

I did enjoy this book, but with caveats. I have loved many an Indian epic novel – I count Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy among my all-time favourite reads – but this one did not quite do it for me. I do think the background cast of characters, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families, was important in portraying modern India, what has changed and what hasn’t, but there were times when the level of detail felt too much. Towards the end, for example, the account of Sonia’s father’s illness and his experience of his treatment, felt unnecessary. And the lengthy chapters with Elon, Sonia’s artist lover, also felt drawn out more than was necessary; or perhaps it just felt that way to me because he was so ghastly! I’m afraid I do think some judicious editing was called for. 

The author handled all the many complex themes – loneliness, disillusion, the problem of the outsider, the clash of cultures, and the transformation of the vast nation of India – with aplomb, but I do think the narrative could have been tightened. 

The book is an achievement that is worth a read, but it would not have been winner-level for me. I listened to it on audio and it was beautifully read by Sneha Mathan.

Booker shortlist review #1 – “The Rest of Our Lives” by Ben Markovits

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize was announced last week and it was David Szalay’s Flesh. It was this author’s second attempt, having been nominated for All That Man Is in 2016 – the year I started this blog. That was also the first year I set myself the goal of reading all the novels on the shortlist – I don’t think I managed it that year either! (I have no idea how on earth the judges manage to get through so many books – they must have to forego all other meaningful activity for months!) When this year’s shortlist was announced a month or so ago I gave myself a fifty percent chance of getting through the shortlist before the announcement.


Well, predictably, I only got through half the books in time (I already had Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter under my belt), although I did manage to get through Anita Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, all 700 pages of it, which has to be an achievement in itself. 

The first book that I decided to tackle was Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives – according to the blurb it was about a man in mid-life whose children are leaving home to go to college and so it seemed to chime with some aspects of my life right now. I also noted that the author is a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I did my own undergraduate degree in English, so, a happy coincidence.

The central character is Tom, an academic in law, in his fifties, living in New York city with his wife Amy. It is clear that Tom has reached a state of disillusionment with his life. Amy had an affair some years earlier and it is clear that their marriage has never really recovered from this shock. Tom has been waiting until their children have left home before leaving his wife. Tom and Amy’s elder child Michael is at college in California, and when their daughter Miri goes to college in Pittsburgh, Tom drives her there and the moment of reckoning arrives. 

The journey to Pittsburgh is long – around seven hours (which makes my 3 hour journeys to drop my kids off seem pathetic!). After delivering Miri, Tom decides to keep going, not to go back to New York. He tells Amy that he is going to visit an old pal who has been seeking his advice on a legal matter. He keeps driving. 

In the background we learn of Tom’s health complaints, a swollen face every morning that no doctor has yet been able to diagnose satisfactorily. A friend of mine recently described middle age as being like ‘sniper’s alley’ when it comes to health – you can eat well, exercise, avoid smoking or drinking too much, do all the right things, and yet some nasty disease might still get you. It’s true, and one becomes acutely aware of this in middle age. We learn of Tom’s professional disappointments, never having quite attained the goals he hoped he might. He revisits a number of old friends and finds the relationships are not quite how he imagined. What will Tom do with the level of mediocrity he finds himself in?

This is a road trip novel where the central character goes on a journey of self-examination. This could be a cliche if it was not handled extremely well. And I’m afraid that, for me, it was not handled extremely well. I found the author’s writing style languorous and dull. The ending was abrupt and it felt like the author had just got rather bored with his story and decided to stop. The characters lacked spark. The most interesting character for me was actually Michael’s girlfriend Betty, although I am not sure what purpose she served in the novel, except to show Tom how things might have been if he’d made some different choices.

This was not a bad novel, but I find it quite hard to believe that it was considered Booker shortlist-standard, especially a shortlist that omits Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Dream Count. 

Unfortunately, I find this book difficult to recommend.