Deviants

About the Book

From the critically acclaimed author of One Small Voice a bold, electrifying story of a family in which three generations of gay men in India fight for love and dignity against the currents of their times.
A bold, electrifying story of a family in which three generations of gay men in India fight for love and dignity against the currents of their times.
Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.
For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time when, and in a country where, the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.
And before Mambro came his uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.
Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.

About the Author

SANTANU BHATTACHARYA grew up in India, and studied at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. He won the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency in 2023, and the Mo Siewcharran and Life Writing prizes in 2021. His first novel, One Small Voice, was an Observer best debut novel of 2023, and was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Society of Authors’ Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. He now lives in London.