Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. Her debut novel,
My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015
Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays have been published in literary journals including
Air/Light,
Folio Literary Journal,
Juked,
The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the
Santa Monica Review. One received Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Wali's new novel is
Sutra Americana.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Wali's reply:
As a writer, it’s a given I’m also an avid reader. I have a small black journal which contains a list of books I’ve read, starting from 2001. I am a deliberate reader, i.e. slow, and I hate to abandon a book I’ve started. My book lists show my reading selection to be all over the place – from contemporary American to 
world literature to classic and everything in between. The minute I set myself to read only South Asian women writers and immigrant writers (like this year), a comment about the greatness of Henry James leads me to listen to a recorded version of The Portrait of a Lady, which I loved. The truth is I have nothing against dead white men authors—I have learned so much from them— but I do feel passionately that women’s voices, black voices, native voices, immigrant voices, and those from around the world need a greater place on our bookshelves. As one of those voices, I feel a particularly strong bond with my fellow diasporic writers. That said, I accept that my reading habits will be gloriously arbitrary.
One book I recently finished reading is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (2025) At 670 pages this novel is a major undertaking but thankfully is mostly a pleasure to read. Will Sonia and Sunny ever find each other, and then, will they ever find each other again after they stupidly part ways — this is the burning plotline of the novel. But the plot is hardly important – what is important is the web of their respective families and how they have a 
hold on their two children who, having left India to lead searingly lonely lives in America, seem unable to settle into any comfortable notions of identity. There are many passages in which Desai captures beautifully the dilemma of the immigrant: “He (Sunny) often couldn’t determine how he felt exactly about his new life, and it was how he happened to behave then that elucidated his emotions. But he was also unsure whether he was behaving from honest impulse or from playing a part, taking his cues from the people, the weather, the food, even the objects around him… One thing seemed certain: If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out. Yet, despite this fact, they refused to remain apart. India invaded his life all the way from the other side of the world, and then life here became instantly artificial, a taunt. He became an imposter, a spy, a liar, and a ghost.” The book was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and was on many critics best 10 novels. I’m happy I read it — it made me think about the enduring tentacles of Indian families, the tug of India, the complexities of America and how we immigrants find a place for ourselves in this world.
Visit
Monona Wali's website.
Q&A with Monona Wali.
The Page 69 Test: Sutra Americana.
--Marshal Zeringue
Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays have been published in literary journals including Air/Light, Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One received Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
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