Author(s): Gregory David Roberts

General Fiction

With the grand sweep and scale of a Bollywood movie, Shantaram is unlike any other Australian novel for quite some time âÃÂæ this is a rip-roaring read. At 933 pages the book stands out, but it is all the more remarkable because it is based on second-to-none first-hand experience. Full of jail-house philosophy, human frailty and resilience, Sufi wisdom and street-fighting tactics, Shantaram is by turns inspiring, hair-raising and poignant. This warts-and-all Indian epic details the myriad struggles, triumphs, heartbreaks and joys of life on the subcontinentâÃÂÃÂexpect it to become a must-read for backpackers and long-haul airline passengers, as was The Beach.William Gourlay, Australian Bookseller & Publisher was AustraliaâÃÂÃÂs most wanted man.Now heâÃÂÃÂs written AustraliaâÃÂÃÂs most wanted novel.Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts was sentenced to nineteen yearsâÃÂàimprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building-society branches, credit unions, and shops he had committed while addicted to heroin. In July 1980 he escaped from VictoriaâÃÂÃÂs maximum-security prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of AustraliaâÃÂÃÂs most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.For most of this period, after an interlude in New Zealand, he lived in Bombay. He set up a free health clinic in the slums, acted in Bollywood movies, worked for the Bombay mafia as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler and, as a gunrunner, resupplied a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. This is the setting of Shantaram.Apart from having this highly unusual personal background, Greg Roberts is a very gifted writer. His book is a blend of vivid dialogue, unforgettable characters, amazing adventures, and superb evocations of Indian life. It can be read as a vast, extended thriller, as well as a superbly written meditation on the nature of good and evil. It is a compelling tale of a hunted man who had lost everything âÃÂàhis home, his family, and his soul âÃÂàand came to find his humanity while living at the wildest edge of experience. Nothing like this has been written before, and nobody but Greg Roberts could have written it now.It is a huge book in every sense. It is over 940 pages in length (about 385,000 words), and it has a sweep and a power that will captivate readers around the world. It is, quite simply, unputdownable.If you read only five books this year, let it be this one.Shantaram is easily the biggest book by an unknown Australian author ever published.The Age THE AUTHOR Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne in 1952. After surviving the events dealt with in Shantaram, he was captured in Germany in 1990 and eventually extradited to Australia. After he completed his prison sentence, he established a small multi-media company, and is now a full-time writer. He lives in Melbourne.
"A masterpiece" - The Age