Joumana Khatib

This has become my legacy.

I know, but I'm usually right.

You know, The Bee Sting.

The Bee Sting, you're welcome.

Okay, The Bee Sting was so good.

I know, I know.

Okay.

So this is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny.

This has been a long cooking book.

This has been like 20 years in the making.

This is by Kieran Desai.

And this is what you think of as an old-fashioned, sweeping, time-spanning, continent-jumping, rich kind of

romantic epic and it follows two immigrants um sonia when we meet her is a college student and she's lonely and she's miserable and like hates the dorm food and she gets mixed up with this like horrible older painter and and then sunny who is a journalist and

and trying to make it in New York.

And of course, both Sonia and Sunny are, you know, grappling with their family ties back in India.

And their paths cross, first on a train, and then it turns out that their families know each other in these increasingly entwined ways.

It's lush, it's sensual, it's completely absorbing.

There's a real wit to this book.

And I think that for me...

And the representative anecdote that I have about this book is that I was reading it when I was visiting my family over the summer, and I was so absorbed in this book that I did not notice that the neighbor's orchard was on fire.