Desai and Yee Featured in New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2025" List
Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee '17 and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai '93 are among the 100 Notable Books of 2025 selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Writes The New York Times of Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee '17:
"Yee’s delightful and quirky novel takes place during a pause — between divorce and marriage, sickness and health, the unknown and the status quo. The titular visit to a bar turns out not to be a setup for a joke, but a husband’s admission to his wife that he’s leaving her. Then our narrator — the soon-to-be-ex-wife — learns that she has cancer. She navigates both upheavals with dry humor, even finding it in her heart to write a most unexpected 'Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual.'"
The New York Times previously highlighted Yee's novel as one of the best beach reads for summer 2025.
Writes The New York Times of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai '93:
"In this rich, bustling, old-fashioned epic, a young couple pushed toward marriage by their Indian families embark on what Desai has called 'an endlessly unresolved romance,' navigating competing forces of tradition and modernity, love and duty, East and West."
Desai was a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. The New York Times previously reported on Desai's latest novel, her first new release in twenty years.