Little Atoms 970 - Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Thomas McMullan lives and works in London. His debut novel, The Last Good Man, won the 2021 Betty Trask Prize. His short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, The Dublin Review, Granta, 3:AM Magazine, Lighthouse and Best British Short Stories, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, ArtReview and BBC News. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Groundwater. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first full length work of non-fiction Death of an Ordinary Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her new Booker Prize Shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and Stone Blind. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora’s Jar, was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. She has written and performed eleven series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015 she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel No Friend To This House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick Ryan's short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29 and Electric Literature, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. His debut collection of linked short stories, Send Me, was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new novel Buckeye. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest work of non-fiction A Truce That Is not Peace. Note: Contains discussion of suicide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of Wise Men, The Inseparables, Rooms for Vanishing and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Rooms For Vanishing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since Laura Lippman's debut, she has been recognised as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her "special, even extraordinary," and Gillian Flynn wrote, "She is simply a brilliant novelist." Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. On this episode of Little Atoms, Laura talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Murder Takes a Vacation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London. On this episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, his first book for which he was the recipient of the 2023 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award, awarded for debut works of non-fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She was educated in the US and now lives in London. Her first novel Golden Child won multiple prizes and was named one of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World’. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her Booker Prize long listed new novel Love Forms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.