DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of the Kiran Desai live event as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Kiran Desai will read from her new novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, followed by an on-stage conversation led by Houston writer Kartika Budhwar.
Kiran Desai is the author of novel The Inheritance of Loss, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man 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. According to The New Yorker, the novel, “briskly paced and sumptuously written, … ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.” She is also author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which The Times of London calls “so fresh and funny and delicious that it defies comparison.”
Desai joins us in Houston with her highly anticipated new book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. The novel 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” and hailed as “magnificent – a masterpiece” in a starred review by Kirkus, the book navigates themes of love, generational clash, class, race, and migration. Namwali Serpell calls it “a grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose.”
Kartika Budhwar’s prose and poetry appears in Arts and Letters where she was awarded second place in the Arts and Letters Fiction Prize, in Blue Mesa Review, where she won the Blue Mesa Nonfiction Prize, and the Indiana Review, where she won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. She was also a Finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow and served as a Brazos Bookstore Sustaining the Writing Life Fellow. She has received the Matthew Salesses Asian American Fellowship, the Albert L. Walker Excellence in Literature Award, the Research Excellence Award, the Hogrefe Excellence Grant for Creative Writing and a Teaching Excellence Award. Kartika is a writer, editor, educator and creative coach based in Houston, Texas.
