[[{“value”:”
Every year, people around the world observe Pride Month in June to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community and their contributions to society. While it also a time to raise awareness about their struggles to equal rights in society, there is no better way to be an ally than learn more about their lives.
While there are many different mediums through which one can do that today, books are the easiest medium to explore their lives in more ways than one.
Here are some books by Westland Books to get you started:
Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace by Parmesh Shahani
The reading down of Section 377 by the Supreme Court in 2018 has led to a fundamental shift in the rights of India’s LGBTQ citizens and necessitated policy changes across the board—not least in the conservative world of Indian business. In this path-breaking and genre-defying book, Parmesh Shahani—vice president at Godrej Industries Ltd—draws from his decade-long journey in the corporate world as an out and proud gay man, to make a cogent case for LGBTQ inclusion and lay down a step-by-step guide to reshaping office culture in India. He talks to inclusion champions and business leaders about how they worked towards change; traces the benefits reaped by industry giants like Godrej, Tata Steel, IBM, Wipro, the Lalit group of hotels and many others who have tapped into the power of diversity; and shares the stories of employees whose lives were revolutionised by LGBTQ-friendly workspaces. In this affecting memoir-cum-manifesto, Shahani animates the data and strategy with intimate stories of love and family.
It has no name by Payal Dhar
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ Sami should be used to this question, but it still turns her insides to ice. And there will be a lot more for her to face when Ma and she move back to Chandnisarai, a place where she was once viciously bullied. But the town wrong-foots her from the get-go. Her new school doesn’t insist on skirts and, after some initial curiosity, her classmates are indifferent to her severe buzzcut. Sami finds refuge in the cricket club by day and discovers a whole new world of streaming television by night. She even makes friends: the level-headed Laila, the fun-loving Murad, the mysterious Vidhi, and—online—the nameless Gaybe. As Sami starts to be lulled into a sense of ease, however, old secrets and forgotten memories resurface. She must make a choice, but in doing so, will she lose the friendships that are her lifelines?An irresistible coming-of-age story of a gay teen in modern India.
Radiant Fugitives: A Novel by Nawaaz Ahmed
A dazzling, operatic debut novel following three generations of a Muslim Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change.Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, travelling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children.But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself.Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.
Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd: A Bibliomystery by Unmana
A fat lesbian partners with her boss she is crushing on to investigate the murder of a bookstore owner in Bengaluru. When the owner of the bookshop above Chikkamma Tours gets stabbed to death in the building, grumpy, book-obsessed, wise-cracking, whisky-drinking Nilima jumps at the opportunity to play amateur detective. What`s more, it seems like the perfect excuse to get close to her alluring boss Shwetha. But to successfully investigate the murder, Nilima also needs to learn to work with her annoying colleague Poorna and with Inspector Sharmila Lamani, who is in a relationship with Nilima`s ex-girlfriend. Braving the incessant rain, a local gangster and sundry other shady characters, as well as the police, who seem intent on charging an innocent man, Nilima, Shwetha and Poorna are soon hot on the trail of the murderer.
Night in Delhi by Ranbir Sidhu
There are no good people here. And perhaps no truly evil ones. A small-time thief and hustler and his lover and pimp, who is a rising star in Delhi`s music scene. A lost American and acolyte of a so-called guru. A young woman who hopes to save herself by becoming a boss in one of India`s new mafias. And everyone floating in a world of shades of grey.
No Place to Call My Own by Alina Gufran
An intimate, arresting portrait of millennial angst in a mercurial, volatile world. Feeling trapped in a society that’s quick to undermine her—constantly making assumptions about her religion, sexuality, ambition, worth—Sophia plunges headlong into a journey of questionable decisions through her twenties. We follow her through cities and towns as she tries to make sense of the old while confronting the new. But each move trails chaos in its wake.
Restless and acerbic, she struggles to come to terms with the disintegration of her parents’ marriage, eerily mirrored in the political turmoil of twenty-first-century India. And crucial to Sophia’s story—which unfolds against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, the 2020 Delhi riots and a global pandemic—is her complex, thorny friendship with Medha, a queer artist with travails of her own.
How does one even begin to fit in when apathy becomes a mode of survival? How is it possible to truly belong when one feels estranged from oneself? Sophia’s journey is not just her own but that of any young woman who finds herself caught ‘in between’—unable to back down and refusing to conform—and who doesn’t quite feel rooted to one place or identity.
Deviants: The Queer Family Chronicles by Santanu Bhattacharya
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.
Atypical: Five Strategy Rules for a New World by Prateek Raj
A reflection on the current mode of capitalism and a call to action to rethink everything – leadership, strategy, innovation and even progress itself. What if the most valuable insights into your company’s future aren’t buried in your big data or shared by industry experts—but voiced quietly at the edges, by the very people you’ve been ignoring? In Atypical: Five Strategy Rules for a New World, UCL and IIMB professor Prateek Raj challenges the status quo by showing how the world’s most innovative organisations learn from voices at the fringes—be they marginalised communities, unexpected collaborators or frontline workers.
“}]]
