Overview

""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 A breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, Railsong is the heartwarming story of an individual coming of age amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India. In a newly independent India charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the shackles of her impoverishment and meagre prospects. As diesel engines replace steam and the calamitous churn of drought, famine, and a great strike engulfs her town, Charu dares to imagine a different future for herself. She boards a train and flees westwards, leaving behind the oppressive domesticity of her childhood for the alluring modernity, and apparent opportunities, of Bombay. Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her she becomes an unlikely hero: a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open-sometimes guilelessly-to her nation's vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac, and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of grit, optimism, and the force of character that enables one remarkable woman to live on her own terms in a country full of contradictions.

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9781639736225

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Reviews

""Bhattacharya's gift for reproducing the rhythms and intricacies of his characters' speech . . . places him in the company of Mark Twain. He understands the world by listening to it."" --The New Yorker on THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE ""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, The Boston Globe on THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE ""[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, The New York Times Book Review on THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE

Author Information

Rahul Bhattacharya is a writer, journalist, and editor. His first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Pundits from Pakistan, his first book, was a Wisden Cricketer top ten cricket book of all time. He was born in Bombay and lives in Delhi with his wife and two daughters.

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