Deviants

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

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.

'Compulsive and wrenching ... Bhattacharya has written the epic text for the South Asian queer community that the characters in this book long to find' Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark

'There is an epic confidence to Bhattacharya’s writing' Samira Ahmed

'It’s magnificent: funny, melancholic, sharply true. The force of it crept up on me in a brilliantly subtle way' James Cahill, author of Tiepolo Blue

'Bhattacharya's storytelling talents are limitless' Nikesh Shukla, praise for One Small Voice

A joy to read, a full universe of feeling ... A born storyteller' Max Porter, praise for One Small Voice

© Santanu Bhattacharya 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025