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.
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.
In a young country charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for a life freed of the oppressive domesticity and meagre prospects in her railway township. As India moves from steam to diesel locomotives, through drought and famine, a great strike and state repression, she dares to imagine and demand a different future for herself, boarding a train and fleeing westwards to Bombay.
There in the great modern metropolis of alluring opportunity, she seeks the means to live on her own terms. Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her, Charu is a small hero, a railway woman who keeps her heart open – sometimes guilelessly – to her nation’s vast possibility.
Rahul Bhattacharya said, ‘Railsong, to embrace train metaphors, is a thickly peopled novel chronicling one person’s odyssey across a vast, varied landscape – as I hope readers find all our lives are. Writing it was strenuous, sweaty, meaningful. At journey end, I couldn’t have been happier to be received by my expert editors – Paul Baggaley, Sivapriya R, Callie Garnett – and their wonderful colleagues across Bloomsbury, whose list I’ve long admired.’
Paul Baggaley, Editor in Chief at Bloomsbury UK, said, ‘We are delighted to welcome Rahul Bhattacharya to Bloomsbury with the global publication of his masterpiece Railsong. I am personally excited to be reunited with this hugely talented writer, whose prize-winning debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, I was proud to publish nearly 15 years ago. I am convinced that Railsong will receive the same critical acclaim, and will also reach many new readers, with its combination of epic storytelling and compelling description, all seen through the eyes of its enchanting central character, Charu.’
R Sivapriya, Publisher, Literary and Translations, at Bloomsbury India,said, ‘Charulata Chitol receives an arduous education of the heart in Rahul Bhattacharya’s glorious new novel, Railsong. She awakens to the nation’s people in her job as a railway woman. She cultivates persistence and optimism even as she is tempered by the fever and tedium of Indian life. On our part, we readers are renewed and revived by Charu’s vision and practice. We aregalvanised to persevere in the maelstrom of our present. When there is hope on offer, what more could we ask for? It is a profound pleasure to publish this splendid and moving novel at Bloomsbury India.’
Callie Garnett, Editorial Director of Fiction and Memoir at Bloomsbury USA, praised Railsong, calling it ‘a work of phenomenal range, humorous, loving, spanning decades of India’s history and social organization. The novel’s fullness is inextricable from its two heroes, the spirited Charulata Chitol—whose curiosity, happiness, and heartbreak call to my mind Maggie Tulliver from Eliot’s Mill on the Floss—and the complex Indian railway system where Charu casts her lot. Bhattacharya’s is a great, compassionate epic, a novel “in praise and pity” of this remarkable person and the turmoil of her world. Bloomsbury USA could not be prouder to publish Railsong with our global partners.’
Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the novel The Sly Company of People Who Care, winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize, and Pundits from Pakistan, a Wisden Cricketer top ten cricket book of all time.
For more information contact: Meenakshi.Singh@bloomsbury.com