‘The book brims with heart and compassion… bristles with outrage at the difficulty of living a life of one’s own and the disappointments of marriages and careers; marvels at the quicksilver joys of solidarity. We can only hope Bhattacharya’s next novel isn’t 15 years in coming.’
The Guardian

‘Familial bonds, friendships, Charu’s brushes with desire and romance—the human drama plays out against the backdrop of national change… The rhythms of Bhombalpur and Bombay’s big city buzz, humour and tenderness, tragedy and triumph, shadow and sunshine, love and lust and heartbreak—the novel’s tapestry is threaded through with it all… Charulata Chitol is certainly one of the most memorable characters in contemporary South Asian literature. Her song, hopeful and resolute, lingers long after you finish reading Railsong.’
Outlook

‘This big novel is curiously weightless . . . those who are patient will find beauty in small moments . . . This elusive, tantalizing novel aims for the effect of the raga to conjure “the sadness, the richness, the pleasure of the waiting and the wandering.”’
The Wall Street Journal

‘A quietly analytical study of a quietly analytical individual that, nonetheless, builds a gradual case for itself as an elegiac portrait of a vast country “linked by the permanent way”.’
Times Literary Supplement

‘The novel’s witty, slightly Dickensian tone offers both humor and poignancy. This bildungsroman concerning one woman’s quest to define her identity also brings India into sharp focus.’
Kirkus

‘Tracing Charu’s story against tidal forces of history is brilliant, and her perception of feminism’s impact is moving.’
Booklist

“Original, exceptional, riveting, Railsong showcases novelist Rahul Bhattacharya’s genuine flair for the kind of narrative driven and memorable storytelling style that fully engages the reader’s imaginative attention from start to finish.”
The Midwest Book Review

‘Rahul Bhattacharya’s generous storytelling captures the coming-of-age of Charu Chitol, a railwayman’s daughter in newly independent India. Charu dreams of escaping poverty, domesticity, and patriarchal society for modern life in Bombay, and hopes to marry for love. Amid a country undergoing change, Charu forges her future with optimism.’
Christian Science Monitor

‘Astonishing and enigmatic … A sprawling, rhapsodic ode to a changing India in the final decades of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Charu Chitol, who from an early age is enraptured by India’s “great railway system whose railsong plucks at our souls no less musically than a sitar string” … Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong truly sings.’
World Literature Today

‘The novel is engrossing in its attention to detail: the transition from steam to diesel, the rhythms of railway life, the quiet humiliations of class and gender. Charu’s unlikely rise as railway employee and census enumerator unfolds with elegiac sweep and flashes of humor. Immersive and deeply felt, it renders personal ambition inseparable from a nation in motion.’
Indulge Magazine

‘Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut novel The Sly Company of People Who Care is one of my favorite novels of the century. Its followup, Railsong, is even more impressive in its epic depiction of one woman’s life in India.’
The Largehearted Boy

‘Meet Charulata Chitol, a central railways welfare inspector. Conscientious, self-aware, and immediately engaging… Her journey allows Bhattacharya to illuminate the personal and the national, the individual against the sweep of history, leaving the reader with a finely-wrought sense of a life and a nation in transit.’
The Wire

‘Bhattacharya’s novel is expansive, spanning decades and miles … Railsong is ultimately about finding identity in a modernizing society grappling with histories of discrimination.’
The Historical Novel Society

‘[A] sprawling tale, told with flair and heart.’
California Review of Books

‘This epic novel is recommended for fans of coming-of-age stories, railroad travel, and delicately descriptive prose.”
WordSmarts newsletter

‘Through Charu’s life, Bhattacharya constructs a portrait of a nation whose people are constantly in motion, navigating the intersecting tracks of memory, labour and politics… What emerges is less a conventional historical chronicle than a meditation on the lives carried within a nation’s infrastructure—millions of journeys unfolding simultaneously along the same rails.’
Asian Review of Books