It took Kiran Desai nearly 20 years to write her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny . I mean this as a sincere tribute when I say I'm amazed it only took her that long.

Desai's near 700-page novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize , is about exile and displacement — not only from one's home country, family and culture, but also from one's own sense of self. The multi-character, multi-stranded plot roams from locales in India and the U.S. — Delhi, Goa, Vermont, Brooklyn — with side trips to Italy and Mexico.

This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desa

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