‘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 of Bombay, hasn’t published anything since his 2002 magnum opus, Family Matters. We can only hope there’s a new book on the horizon soon.
‘Rahul Bhattacharya, meanwhile, a journalist and cricket writer raised in Bombay, wowed readers with his 2011 debut, The Sly Company of People Who Care, a sly, audacious excursion into the interior of Guyana. It was a revelation, alive to the rhythms and mysteries of the country’s landscape, history, and people. Now, fifteen years later, Bhattacharya has returned with a follow-up just as astonishing and enigmatic. Railsong (Bloomsbury, 2026) is 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.”
