Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Now a major television series from Apple TV+ starring Charlie Hunnam! "It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured." An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power. Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas-this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Editorial Reviews Shantaram is a novel of the first order, a work of extraordinary art, a thing of exceptional beauty. If someone asked me what the book was about, I would have to say everything, every thing in the world. Gregory David Roberts does for Bombay what Lawrence Durrell did for Alexandria, what Melville did for the South Seas, and what Thoreau did for Walden Pond: He makes it an eternal player in the literature of the world." -Pat Conroy "Shantaram has provided me with the richest reading experience to date and I don't expect anybody to unseat its all-round performance for a long time. It is seductive, powerful, complex, and blessed with a perfect voice. Like a voodoo ghost snatcher, Gregory David Roberts has captured the spirits of the likes of Henri CharriËre, Rohinton Mistry, Tom Wolfe, and Mario Vargas Llosa, fused them with his own unique magic, and built the most gripping monument in print. The land of the god Ganesh has unchained the elephant, and with the monster running amok, I tremble for the brave soul dreaming of writing a novel about India. Gregory David Roberts is a suitable giant, a dazzling guru, and a genius in full." -Moses Isegawa, author of Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit "Shantaram is, quite simply, the 1001 Arabian Nights of the new century. Anyone who loves to read has been looking for this book all their reading life. Anyone who walks away from Shantaram untouched is either heartless or dead or both. I haven't had such a wonderful time in years." -Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples "Shantaram is dazzling. More importantly, it offers a lesson...that those we incarcerate are human beings. They deserve to be treated with dignity. Some of them, after all, may be exceptional. Some may even possess genius." -Ayelet Waldman, author of Crossing the Park "Utterly unique, absolutely audacious, and wonderfully wild, Shantaram is sure to catch even the most fantastic of imaginations off guard." -Elle "Shantaram had me hooked from the first sentence. [It] is thrilling, touching, frightening...a glorious wallow of a novel." -Detroit Free Press "[A] sprawling, intelligent novel...full of vibrant characters...the exuberance of his prose is refreshing...Roberts brings us through Bombay's slums and opium houses, its prostitution dens and ex-pat bars, saying, You come now. And we follow." -The Washington Post "Inspired storytelling." -People "Vivid, entertaining. Its visceral, cinematic descriptive beauty truly impresses." -USA Today "Few stand out quite like Shantaram ...nothing if not entertaining. Sometimes a big story is its own best reward." -The New York Times "...very good...vast of vision and breadth." -Time Out "This massive autobiographical novel draws heavily from Roberts' vida loca. Don't let the size scare you away - Shantaram is one of the most gripping tales of personal redemption you'll ever read." -Giant Magazine "This reviewer is amazed that Roberts is here to write anything. Swallowed up by the abyss, somehow he crawled out intact....His love for other people was his salvation...Powerful books can change our lives. The potency of Shantaram is the joy of forgiveness. First we must regret, then forgive. Forgiveness is a beacon in the blackness." -Dayton Daily News " Shantaram is loads of colorful fun, [it] rises to something grand in its evocations of the pungent chaos of Bombay. " -Minneapolis Star Tribune "Shantaram is a true epic. It is a huge, messy, over-the-top irresistible shaggy-dog story." -The Seattle Times - From the Publisher A gentle giant on the scale of Shantaram can afford a few unintended giggles, but million-rupee questions remain: Why, given Roberts's wealth of material and penchant for soul-searching, didn't he write a memoir? And what of Linbaba's debt to society and, presumably, to his briefly mentioned young daughter back in Australia? What is he really after, anyway? But it seems unsporting to begrudge Roberts the license to thrill while having such a good time -- and Shantaram, mangrove-scented prose and all, is nothing if not entertaining. Sometimes a big story is its own best reward. And there's always the next installment. - The New York Times - Megan O'Grady Part travelogue, part love letter, part autobiography, Shantaram is a vivid, entertaining but slightly grandiose tale of Lin, an ex-junkie and convicted robber who escapes from an Australian prison then hides in the most alien of places: the hot, filthy, decadent, seaside metropolis of Bombay. - USA Today - Rita Bishnoi At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla and her mysterious inability to love in return gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws. A sensational read, it might well reproduce its bestselling success in Australia here. Agent, Joe Regal Literary. (Oct. 18) Forecast: This is a novel with electric appeal, heightened by Roberts's exotic backstory (see q&a, p. 36). There should be plenty of media interest in the book and its author, and its sheer heft will make it stand out in bookstores. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Having ditched his revolutionary ideals for heroin, our narrator ends up imprisoned in Australia, then escapes to an evidently vividly depicted Bombay to smuggle drugs and arms. What's really scary is that Roberts has based his first novel on personal experience. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal "The truth is, the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain": an elegantly written, page-turning blockbuster by Australian newcomer Roberts. The story is taken from Roberts's own life: an Australian escapes from prison (he committed armed robbery to support heroin addiction) and flees to Mumbai (here, Bombay), where, hiding in the slums, he finds himself becoming at once increasingly Christlike and increasingly drawn into the criminal demimonde. The narrator, Lin, now going by Shantaram Kishan Kharre, takes to healing the sick while learning the ways of India's poor through the good offices of a guide named Pribaker, who's a little shady and more than a little noble, and through the booze-fogged lens provided by dodgy Eurotrash expats like aging French bad boy Didier, who "spoke a lavishly accented English . . . to provoke and criticize friend and stranger alike with an indolent malignity." Measuring their lives in the coffeespoons of one monsoon season to the next, these characters work in the orbit of fabulous crimelords and their more actively malign lieutenants, all with murky connections to the drug trade, Bollywood, and foreign intelligence agencies (as one tells our narrator, "All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret"). Violence begets violence, the afflicted are calmed and balmed, friends are betrayed, people are killed, prison doors are slammed shut, then opened by well-greased palms. It's an extraordinarily rich scene befitting Les Miserables, a possible influence here, or another less obvious but just as philosophically charged ancestor, James Michener's TheDrifters. Roberts is a sure storyteller, capable of passages of precise beauty, and if his tale sometimes threatens to sprawl out of bounds and collapse under its own bookish, poetic weight, he draws its elements together at just the right moment. A roman-a-clef rejoinder to Suketu Mehta's Maximum City (p. 676), splendidly evoking an India few outsiders know. Agent: Jenny Darling/Jenny Darling & Associates, Australia - Kirkus Reviews