“It is a story about the weight of the years and the vagaries of connection, the progress of civilisation and the regress of humanity. Dark and light notes come together to create the eponymous song that plays like a background score to the individual and national tragedies that make up its plot… A fictional saga like Railsong demands not only imaginative daring, but also dogged discipline. Bhattacharya delivers on both counts abundantly. It has been well worth the wait for him to arrive at this sublime, clear-eyed vision of India”
Bloomsbury India will publish Railsong, the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed writer Rahul Bhattacharya, on 4 November 2025. Bloomsbury acquired world rights for Railsong from literary agent Shruti Debi. The novel will be published globally by Bloomsbury Publishing, with simultaneous release in the US and the UK in February 2026. The book will be released in India first, ahead of the international editions, making it available to Indian readers several months in advance of its global publication.
In an innovative marketing initiative, Bloomsbury India will release two distinct covers for the book, designed specifically for the Indian readership. This will offer bookshops a unique proposition, catering to diverse tastes, and enhance the visibility of Railsong in physical stores across the country.
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
“Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong is a novel of rare attentiveness – to the turns of a life, to the slow sediment of time. It creates an extraordinary archive from a single life, thick with everydayness, layered with complexity and profundity. Even when I wasn’t reading, I found myself thinking about the world of Railsong, for in Ms. Chitol, Bhattacharya gives us a heroine to hold in one’s heart.” ― Aanchal Malhotra, author of The Book of Everlasting Things
‘We’ve become accustomed, maybe even resigned, to the long wait for big, new novels from our favorite authors. Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, at nearly seven hundred pages, was a sensation when it came out last fall, almost twenty years after her 2006 Booker Prize–winning The Inheritance of Loss. Rohinton Mistry, that great chronicler — Read More…
“It is a story about the weight of the years and the vagaries of connection, the progress of civilisation and the regress of humanity. Dark and light notes come together to create the eponymous song that plays like a background score to the individual and national tragedies that make up its plot… A fictional saga — Read More…
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