Deviants

bySantanu Bhattacharya

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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, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

And before that was Mambro’s 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.

Bhattacharya has written a compelling, concise epic, where politics, love and freedom are balanced and blended into a novel that is unflinching about the cruelties of the past, optimistic about what comes next, but wise enough to know that progress comes with costs, too

Guardian

About Santanu Bhattacharya

Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of two novels, One Small Voice and Deviants, and several works of short fiction. One Small Voice was an Observer Best Debut Novel for 2023, and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. Deviants won the Rainbow Award and BLF-Atta Galata Prize 2025, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Santanu is the recipient of the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency, the Mo Siewcharran Prize, the Life Writing Prize, and a London Writers’ Award. He grew up in India, and now lives in London.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781405968409
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Price: £0.99
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