“This is the book I was meant to read,” I told Captain Nemo.

It was one of my psychic moments. While perusing the Booker Prize longlist in July.  I was excited to learn that Kiran Desai had a new book. Her stunning novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is her first since she won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. (By the way, her mother, Anita Desai, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.)

I wanted to read the new book immediately.  The glitch: the publication date wasn’t till September 23. Captain Nemo devotedly assured me he would buy it as soon as it hit the bookstores.  You will be delighted to know that he did so:  it is either a late birthday gift or an early Christmas gift. I loved it!

Desai’s new book has made quite a stir in the U.S. For one thing, it is on the Booker shortlist, and that prize fascinates Americans. I pored over an interview with Desai in The New York Times and also saw a video of a charming interview on the CBS Saturday Morning Show. Born in India, Desai moved to New York when she was 16. She lives in Jackson Heights in New York, where the character Sunny also lives for a time.

Desai worked on this novel for 20 years.  Then one day she printed it out and was shocked to discover it was 5,000 pages long.  That’s when she decided she had to get it under control. (The book has 670 pages.)

What has emerged is a spellbinding novel about two young people who fall in love and the exploits of their dramatic families in India. Parts of the novel are funny and entertaining, others unbearably sad, but the prose is always graceful, sometimes effervescent.

This has been billed as a love story, but it is also a family saga, set in India, the U.S., Italy, and Mexico.  Sonia and Sunny are lonely in New York, so Sonia’s father in India suggests to Sunny’s mother that they arrange a marriage for the couple.  Babita thinks it’s an absurd idea, but dutifully tells Sunny. Sonia and Sunny scoff at the concept, though they can’t find true love on their own, either.  But the two fall in love when they finally meet in India.

And here’s TOO much background on the lovers.

Sonia moved to the U.S. to attend college in Vermont. Over the winter break, she stays in the dorm because it is too expensive to fly to India. During long, lonely days, she is seduced by a charming middle-aged artist who is moody,  demanding, and scary.  And then after graduation, she is exploited by a female art gallery owner in New York who pressures her to date an elderly patron who will then presumably buy some paintings. Sonia quits on the spot, flees to India, and moves in with Papa, a wily entrepreneur.  She is too disturbed by her experiences in America to pursue a career, but she begins to freelance for a magazine and wants to write a novel.

Sunny, a journalist for the Associated Press in New York, is eager to write but bored and disappointed to find himself editing copy on the night desk.  When he returns to India to visit Babita, his overbearing mother, he meets Sonia and they fall in love.  The two are soulmates, though they are very different types. Sunny is political:  he sees the U.S. in terms of class, race, imperialism, and the economy, while Sonia focuses on personal experience and tires of his constant analysis. While Sunny is in India he writes his breakthrough AP story, a silly feature about a freakish Indian man who claims to have grown the longest fingernails in the world. But that light breakthrough piece makes it possible for Sunny to publish a serious essay that wins a prize.

I loved this book so much that I had to put it aside sometimes.  I was copying Sonia, who feels this way about Snow Country.  (At least I think that was the Japanese novel she mentioned! It is so beautiful that she finds it unbearable.)  Well, I pretty much devoured this book, but I did sit and think about it sometimes.

So here’s a great thing about the Booker Prize: without the list I might not have learned about this book.