The Loneliness of Souza

Nadia Souza is a documentary filmmaker who has spent her career keeping the world at a carefully maintained distance — observing, recording, never quite arriving. When she returns to Goa after a long absence, the city she finds is both familiar and completely changed, and the people she encounters there force her to confront what she has been recording instead of living. Kiran Desai writes about the interior lives of people who have displaced themselves with a precision that is simultaneously tender and merciless.

Desai, winner of the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, brings the same quality of attention to this smaller, more concentrated canvas — a novel that works equally well as intimate domestic fiction and as a broader meditation on belonging, diaspora, and the nature of documentary truth.

Compelling contemporary fiction from one of the most important voices in Indian literature writing in English. Published by Penguin.