Hungarian-British author David Szalay beats Kiran Desai to win Booker Prize

Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man's life, the Booker Prize judges said of their winning choice. 

Desai missed out on becoming only the fifth double winner in Booker Prize's 56-year history, having won the coveted literary prize for fiction back in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss'. I wanted to write a book about global loneliness through the lens of a long, unresolved love story, Desai has said of her new novel. "I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. In the past of my parents, and certainly my grandparents, an Indian love story would mostly be rooted in one community, one class, one religion, and often also one place. But a love story in today's globalised world would likely wander in so many different directions," she said. 

At 667 pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' was described by the Booker judges as an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity revolving around a pair of young Indians Sonia and Sunny. An intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all, the judges said of the Indian author's latest work. The writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny, they praised. -- PTI