Hamish Hamilton secures Kiran Desai's 'ambitious' new novel

Hamish Hamilton has secured the "long-awaited" novel from Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. 

Publisher Simon Prosser acquired British Commonwealth and volume rights, excluding Canada and India, from Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency for publication on 25th September 2025. The audiobook edition will be released simultaneously by Penguin Random House Audio. Hogarth will publish the novel in the United States, Knopf in Canada, Penguin Random House in India, Salamandra in Spain and Campanhia das Letras in Brazil. 

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Desai’s first novel since The Inheritance of Loss which won the Booker Prize in 2006 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest is an "epic" love story about two young Indians living in the US and having to navigate class, race, history and intergenerational bonds. The publisher added: "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."

Desai commented: "Using the comic lens of an endlessly unresolved romance between two modern Indians, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny examines Western and Eastern notions and manifestations of love and solitude as they play out across the geographical and emotional terrain of today’s globalised world. I think only a novel can get at the raw truth regarding what people are privately thinking and negotiating." 

Prosser added: "Being with Kiran when she won the Booker Prize in 2006 is one of my happiest memories, so it is a joy to be publishing her new novel at Hamish Hamilton. A book which could only have been written over many years, it has a depth and maturity which sweeps the reader into the story from the very first pages. A grand love story, spanning decades and continents, it is told with remarkable intimacy, intelligence, humour and style, charged by the shifting politics of an ever-changing world."