Shelf Life: Kiran Desai

Nearly 20 years after her book The Inheritance of Loss was published, Kiran Desai is finally back with her third novel: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which has already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “I wanted to write an aching story about how modernity affects our spiritual beings in the elemental matters of love and loneliness,” she says, “one that I could put on the shelf alongside the books I love, like Anna Karenina, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Love in the Time of Cholera.”