Within the first few pages of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s stunning new novel, the fissures among generations, cultures, classes, and countries become abundantly clear. When Dadaji learns from his son Manav that his granddaughter Sonia, who is studying in the United States, weeps during her telephone calls back home to India because she is “lonely,” we’re told: “In Allahabad, they had no patience with loneliness.” In fact, Dadaji recalls his school days reading William Wordsworth’s poem that opens “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” a line that “struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash.” This is just one of the many divides that Desai explores in a story filled with sensitivity, complexity, and the occasional dose of humor. {read}