Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, presents acclaimed author Kiran Desai on Monday, November 17, 7:30 pm, at the Alley Theatre, as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. She will read from and talk about her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, in an on-stage conversation with Houston writer, editor, and educator Kartika Budhwar, followed by a book signing in the lobby. General admission tickets are $5 and can be purchased on the Inprint website. Free tickets for students and senior citizens are available upon request. Books will be available for sale at the event through Brazos Bookstore.

“I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty,” said Desai in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation, which has named The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as a finalist of the 2025 Booker Prize.

“As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realized that I could widen the scope of my novel to write about loneliness in a much broader sense,” Desai said. “Not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world – all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness.”

Called “spellbinding” and an “epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sweeping story that intertwines the lives of two young Indian writers—Sonia, an aspiring novelist returning to India from Vermont, and Sunny, a journalist navigating life in New York. Their chance encounter on a train reverberates through family entanglements, diaspora anxieties, and creative yearning.

Praised by Ann Patchett as “a spectacular literary achievement – I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever,” The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny navigates themes of love, generational clash, race, class, and migration. Literary critic and novelist Namwali Serpell calls it “a grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose,” and The New York Times describes it as “a transcendent triumph … not so much a novel as a marvel.”

Kiran Desai is the author of the novel The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Booker Prize, making Desai at the time the youngest woman to be awarded the Booker and cementing her reputation as a powerful voice in postcolonial literature. She is also the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to acclaim in more than 22 countries. In 2015, the Economic Times listed her as one of the 20 most influential global Indian women. 

Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured more than 400 of the world’s great writers from 40 countries, including winners of 13 Nobel Prizes, 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 68 National Book Awards, 57 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and 18 Booker Prizes, as well as 23 U.S. Poets Laureate. The series and Inprint receive generous underwriting support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Brown Foundation, The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Special thanks to Winpark.

For more information, visit inprint.org or call 713.521.2026.

Time: 7:30pm
Date: November 17, 2025
Address: Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue, Houston 77002
[email protected]
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