Railsong: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

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.

416 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 17, 2026

About the author

Rahul Bhattacharya was born in 1979. A cricket journalist since 2000, he is now a contributing editor with Wisden Asia Cricket and has been writing for the Wisden Almanack since 2003, when he compiled the series overview of India in England, 2002. He also writes for the Guardian.