Out November 2025 in India and February 2026 in the UK and the US.

In a young country charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless child of a railway worker, pines for a life freed of oppressive domesticity. As diesel engines replace steam, and the calamitous churn of drought, famine, strike, chokes the railway township, she dares to imagine a different future for herself. Boarding a train she flees westwards to Bombay, even as the country rumbles towards Emergency. In the frenetic landscape of the great modern metropolis, Charu, the budding adventuress, seeks the means to live on her own terms.

Tenaciously she fills the blanks in her life – the idealistic, artistic father Animesh whom she abandoned; the enigmatic mother Jigyasa long gone; her funny surname Chitol that no one recognizes; her bank balance – with her own material. Negotiating the treacherous planes of love, she marries a sheltered easy-goer. Fighting tragedy and loss, she becomes, after all, a railway woman. Against the rapidly clarifying prejudices around her, unfazed by everyday discriminations, she remains a small hero, an Everywoman who keeps her heart open – sometimes guilelessly – to her nation’s vast possibility.

Sweeping, elegiac and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of a woman forging a life for herself amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.

Praise for Railsong

‘Magnificent. Railsong treads so lightly, and yet has such depth to it. I would follow Miss Chitol to the ends of the earth for the continued joy of her company.’
— Kamila Shamsie, Women’s Prize winning author of Home Fire

‘Few works capture, with such effectiveness, the profound political and social transformations of the last decades of the twentieth century — tracing their impact from the grassroots to the highest levels of society. Negotiating the subtle, intricate bond between the language of lived experience and the language of narration, Rahul Bhattacharya meets that challenge with remarkable assurance, Railsong a testament to the depth and brilliance of his craft. Charu’s solitude permeates the novel, even when she is surrounded by people, even when she performs every duty with care. Rarely has writing so comprehensively, and precisely, captured this haunting feeling — the silent burden of the missing — that stands as the novel’s greatest achievement and its most profound triumph.’
– Vivek Shanbhag, author of Ghachar Ghochar

‘Rahul Bhattacharya is an extraordinary writer, and Railsong is a majestic yet profoundly tender novel. Vigorously alive to the currents of national change as well as to the tragedy, daring, humor, and love experienced in one woman’s days and years, Railsong bids us to observe the worth and intricacy of one person’s journey.”
— Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

‘Rooted in the social history of the seventies to the nineties, when women’s lives were vibrant with change as they started to take their own decisions, the song of Charulata’s life on the railways is a simple but strong, echoing quest for freedom. Rahul Bhattacharya’s prose is so lyrical in tone, and intelligent in wit.’
— Volga, Sahitya Akademi Award winning author of The Liberation of Sita

‘Does anyone write better prose than Rahul Bhattacharya? Every word in this gorgeous, darting novel is a surprise. Bhattacharya has created an epic out of a single life.’
– Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs