Railsong

This is a new book. Condition: Brand New.

'Magnificent' KAMILA SHAMSIE
'Majestic yet profoundly tender' MEGHA MAJUMDAR

A breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, Railsong is the 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.

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Paperback / softback
ISBN13: 9781037206580
Published: February 2026

Number of pages: 416
Width: 152 mm
Height: 232 mm
Depth: 32 mm

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC