Desai double: Anita & Kiran on Obama’s 2025 favourite list

Former US President Barack Obama’s annual list of favourite films, music and books has a way of turning personal taste into global buzz. When Prateek Kuhad’s cold/mess featured on his 2019 playlist, it made the singer hot property overnight. This year, Obama’s reading list has done something rarer still: it has brought together two generations of Indian writing.For 2025, Obama has picked books by Anita Desai and her daughter Kiran Desai. Kiran has already been getting rave reviews for her new novel ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, with some even dubbing it the Great American Indian novel. It made it to the Booker longlist, nearly 19 years after she won the prize for ‘The Inheritance of Loss’. Though it didn’t win the prize, the tale of two Indians navigating love and migration in the US resonated with readers.Anita, 88, whose latest novella ‘Rosarita’ is about a student stumbling on her mother’s hidden past in Mexico, has been shortlisted for the Booker three times but never won. Salman Rushdie has called the mother-daughter pair “the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.” While their fiction could not be more different, their shared appearance on Obama’s bookshelf marks a quiet literary milestone.