A newspaper report about a missing girl, the memory of a midwinter emergency … Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay and others on what inspired their shortlisted books
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
When we emptied my father’s flat after his death, a crowd descended. They rushed away the cupboards and chairs, his shirts and socks. Ragpickers took the rusted appliances. A young woman, the guitar. I remember my father practising Greensleeves over and over. Or did I make that up? It was raining, but my eyes stayed dry. No time for tears – that’s how fast an empire is dismantled. Another landscape gone.
I was already writing about loneliness, about Sonia and Sunny, who meet on the night train to their respective grandparents’ homes, journeying into their past – the past being a kind of home to us all. I was already sensing the restorative depth of their bond, as well as its fragility.
Sonia and Sunny’s relationship unfolds over years and continents – across the United States, Italy, Mexico, India. As they meet and part, negotiating a world without a centre, I wrote about the rifts between nations, between races, genders, religions, all as a kind of loneliness. I wrote about the spaces where news stories disconcertingly changed form, where people made unknowable creatures of themselves. And about shadowlands occupied by phantoms and nightmares that anticipated that a dark undercurrent of history might at any moment explode into renewed violence. I wrote about longing for the vanishing natural world, the magical creatures that forests and oceans once concealed. But I was also interested in loneliness shifting shape into a quiet that is peace after the war is over. A sought-out solitude during a time of transformation. An exquisite artistic loneliness. A discovery of the dignity and privacy of one’s individual being.
