Dear readers, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” the first novel in two decades years by the Booker-winning author Kiran Desai, is exquisite. It’s fair to say I have a thing for 600-page sweeping family stories. Ditto (if less common) narratives that brandish kebab as a major plot apparatus. “Sonia and Sunny” has been one of my more pleasurable reading experiences this year, one so absorbing that — true story! — I failed to notice that the neighbor’s orchard was on fire. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs agrees. This week she gave the book a rave review, praising Desai’s “transcendent” depiction of maddening family expectations, love, alienation and even the natural world, and suggesting that the novel’s 20-year incubation allowed it to soar. Soon after Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006, as she told my colleague Alexandra Alter, she had the idea for “an Indian love story out in the modern world,” one that would explore how love, once determined by class, sect religion and family ties, has become more a matter of chance. This led to a romance that sprawls across continents and decades, following Sonia Shah, an aspiring novelist who attends university in the United States, and Sonny Bhatia, a journalist for The Associated Press, and detailing how their lives inevitably intersect. The book swallowed Desai’s life for years, eclipsing nearly everything else. About seven years into the project, she realized she had generated 5,000 pages: “I was horrified,” she said. “I hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.” Stamina and perseverance helped, as did Desai’s fairly solitary life. (She was really only aware of time passing on her birthday and New Year’s, she said.) And after nearly two decades, what had once been a “dire situation” evolved into a true literary achievement. The book comes out next Tuesday, so you’ll have to wait a bit before making Sonia and Sunny’s acquaintance. See you on Friday. In other news
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