January’s BookBar Book Club book is Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya — a bold, electrifying novel that traces the lives of three generations of gay men in India as they fight for love, freedom and dignity against the powerful social and political currents of their times. Moving between decades and voices, the story explores family, desire, repression and resistance, offering a deeply human portrait of what it means to live truthfully in a world determined to silence you.
Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. 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. Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.
Buy the book here.
January, 2026
