New Delhi, Aug 6 (PTI) Rahul Bhattacharya, author of the award-winning debut novel "The Sly Company of People Who Care", is set to return with his new book "Railsong" in India on November 4, publishing house Bloomsbury announced on Wednesday.
To be released in the US and the UK in February 2026, the book, for its Indian readership, will feature two distinct cover designs. It is touted to be a powerful portrait of a woman forging a life for herself amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.
"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," said Bhatacharya, whose "Sly Company of People Who Care", won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize in 2012 and 2011, respectively.
The book follows Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, who pines for a life freed of the oppressive domesticity and meagre prospects in her railway township. As India moves from steam to diesel locomotives, faces drought and famine, a great strike and state repression, she dares to imagine and demand a different future, boarding a train and fleeing westwards to Bombay.
"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," reads the description of the book.
According to the publisher, "Railsong" is 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," Callie Garnett, editorial director (fiction and memoir) at Bloomsbury USA, said in a statement.
Bhattacharya’s previous book, "Pundits from Pakistan" -- a chronicle of the Indian cricket team’s historic 2004 tour of Pakistan -- was published in 2012.