Deviants

SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD<BR>SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BOWKER VOLCANO PRIZE<BR>AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT OF THE YEAR<BR><BR>'One of the best debuts this year' Guardian<BR><BR>'An intoxicating portrait of modern India ... Terrific' Daily Mail<BR><BR>'Hugely engaging, written with verve, intelligence and compassion' Irish Times<BR>____________________________________________<BR><BR>India, 1992. The country is ablaze with riots. In Lucknow, ten-year-old Shubhankar witnesses a terrible act of mob violence that will alter the course of his life: one to which his family turn a blind eye.<BR><BR>As he approaches adulthood, Shabby focuses on the only path he believes will buy him an escape - good school, good degree, good job, good car. But when he arrives in Mumbai in his twenties, he begins to question whether there might be other roads he could choose. His new friends, Syed and Shruti, are asking the same questions : together, buoyed by the freedom of the big city, they are rewriting their stories.<BR><BR>But as the rising tide of nationalism sweeps across the country, and their friendship becomes the rock they all cling to, this new life suddenly seems fragile. And before Shabby can chart his way forward, he must reckon with the ghosts of his past . . .<BR><BR>____________________________________________<BR><BR>'A joy to read, a full universe of feeling, an effortless page-turner by a born storyteller' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers<BR><BR>'Devastating and intimate, and political and radical all at the same time. Bhattacharya's storytelling talents are limitless' Nikesh Shukla<BR><BR>'A wonderful, timely contribution to world literature' Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of This Mournable Body

'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<BR><BR>'There is an epic confidence to Bhattacharya's writing' Samira Ahmed<BR><BR>'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<BR><BR><BR>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<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.<BR><BR>'Bhattacharya's storytelling talents are limitless' Nikesh Shukla, praise for One Small Voice<BR><BR>A joy to read, a full universe of feeling ... A born storyteller' Max Porter, praise for One Small Voice