Railsong

By: Rahul Bhattacharya

Narrated by: Sudha Bhuchar

Bloomsbury presents Railsong by Rahul Bhattacharya, read by Sudha Bhuchar.

"Magnificent . . . I would follow Miss Chitol to the ends of the earth." —Kamila Shamsie

"Profoundly tender [and] vigorously alive to the currents of national change." —Megha Majumdar

From the Man Asian Prize–shortlisted author Rahul Bhattacharya, a breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways of twentieth-century India.

In a country rapidly modernizing after independence, Animesh Chitol bends his caste title into a quirky surname, moves his family to the brand-new township of Bhombalpur Railway Workshop, and throws in his lot with an optimism-filled future. Then tragedy strikes. Into the empty space left by his wife’s passing grows Chitol's only daughter, the middle child, Charu. As India moves from steam to diesel locomotives, through a great strike and state repression, Charu flees to Bombay, alarmed by her narrow prospects. There she quests for the means to live on her own terms.

Amidst the everyday discriminations of modern India, Charu forges her own destiny, becoming a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open—sometimes guilelessly—to her country's vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac, and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is one woman’s coming of age and a beautifully complex love letter to the finely wrought world of the Indian railways and a country beset by religious and political upheaval.©2026 Rahul Bhattacharya (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

[The novel]'s heart lies in the exuberant and often arresting observations of a man plunging himself a world full of beauty, violence and cultural strife. It's impossible, reading Bhattacharya, not to be reminded of V.S. Naipaul. (Dinaw Mengestu)

A travel novel that reads like award-winning journalism . . . From the novel’s very first line, we know we’re in the care of a narrator unmatched in his lyricism and sensitivity. (Alice Gregory)