Rahul Bhattacharya - Railsong: A Novel

<p><b>'Magnificent'</b> KAMILA SHAMSIE<br><b>'Majestic yet profoundly tender'</b> MEGHA MAJUMDAR <br><br><b>A breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, <i>Railsong </i>is </b><b>the story of an individual coming of age amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.</b><br><br>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. <br><br> 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, <i>Railsong</i> 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.</p>