India, Oct. 7 -- The Oxford English Dictionary defines loneliness as a feeling of unhappiness caused by having no friends or people to talk to.

But loneliness can also exist across spaces - those large or small interstices between and among humans that define relationships. An ordinary person might call these spaces rifts, but Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai interprets them as loneliness itself. Her latest offering, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, examines these connections as much as it explores the distances that separate people.

The novel portrays loneliness in many forms. For instance, Sunny meets a woman who grew up under an authoritarian regime and tells him he knows nothing about loneliness - because she has lived the ...