In Rahul Bhattacharya’s latest novel, Railsong, in a new independent India charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the oppressive domesticity of her childhood and flees to Bombay, the promised land of opportunities. Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her, she becomes an unlikely hero: a railway woman and census enumerator who witnesses, first-hand, the vast possibilities of her nation. Sweeping yet intensely personal, Railsong is stunning in its scope and craft – it is easily among one of the best novels to have been published in recent years.
A review on Scroll noted that “Railsong is a love song that defines a lyricist’s career, even changes it for the better. Bhattacharya is at his composed, elegant best as he belts out his gentle ode to the India that was and the India that can be…”
Railsong, Bhattacharya’s second novel, comes 14 years after his debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, which won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in the UK and the Hindu Literary Prize in India and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Economist Crossword Book Award, and was a Kirkus fiction Book of the Year in the US.
His first book,
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