Belonging: Sonia Gandhi’s Story of Love, Loss and Finding Home

The long-awaited memoir promises to take readers behind the public persona of one of India’s most closely watched political figures, Sonia Gandhi.

Some lives are lived in the public eye. Others are revealed only when the person living them decides to open the door. In Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi does just that.

HarperCollins India will publish the much-awaited memoir in India on 10 November 2026, bringing to readers an intensely personal account of a life that began in a small village in Italy and unfolded across some of the most consequential decades in modern Indian history.

For someone who has remained famously private, the memoir is significant not merely because of the political history it promises to revisit, but because of the personal story beneath it of a young Italian woman who arrived in India through love, became part of one of the country’s most powerful political families, endured devastating personal losses and eventually found herself at the centre of Indian politics.

From Cambridge to Delhi

The story begins in Cambridge in 1965, where nineteen-year-old Sonia Maino meets Rajiv Gandhi. Their romance would eventually bring her to India and into the Nehru-Gandhi family, a transition that meant leaving behind the familiarity of her Italian upbringing and entering a country vastly different from the one she had known.

In Belonging, Sonia revisits those early years with warmth and candour, discovering India through its language, food, clothes, and customs, while gradually building a life alongside Rajiv. She learns Hindi, embraces the sari and becomes part of a family whose name is inseparable from India’s political history.

But behind the Gandhi family’s public stature was an intimate domestic world: a young couple raising their children, Rajiv’s career as a commercial pilot, and the presence of Indira Gandhi, India’s first woman Prime Minister, as both mother-in-law and one of the country’s most formidable political personalities.

When history enters the home

The personal and political collide repeatedly in Sonia’s life. The death of Sanjay Gandhi in a plane crash changes the family’s trajectory. Then comes the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, after which Rajiv, despite Sonia’s reservations, becomes Prime Minister.

The years that follow take the couple across India and the world, placing their family at the centre of national and international attention. And then comes another devastating loss.

In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated while campaigning in Tamil Nadu.

Sonia’s retelling of these years promises something political histories often cannot: the emotional landscape behind events that have become part of India’s collective memory.

From reluctant participant to political leader

Perhaps the most compelling transformation in Belonging is Sonia Gandhi’s own. After Rajiv’s assassination, she chooses to remain in India despite advice from her family in Italy to return home. Her relationship with the country evolves from that of a young woman who married into India to that of someone increasingly drawn into its public life.

Politics, initially something she had resisted, eventually becomes an unexpected chapter of her life.

She goes on to become the longest-serving president of the Indian National Congress, navigating elections, alliances, opposition and the persistent question of her foreign birth. Her political journey reaches a defining moment after the Congress-led alliance’s electoral success, when she is chosen as Prime Minister but declines the country’s highest political office. Belonging offers the chance to hear the story from the woman at its centre.

More than a political memoir

What makes the book particularly intriguing is its promise to move beyond political chronology. At its heart, Belonging is about identity. It is, therefore, as much a story of reinvention as it is a political memoir.

What does it mean to leave one country and make another your home? Can belonging be inherited, chosen or earned? How does a person rebuild a life after loss? And what happens when a private individual is repeatedly called upon to inhabit a very public role?

Published by HarperCollins India, Belonging: A Journey of Love will be available in India from 10 November 2026.