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Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
Book Jacket Information:
_Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory
David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts committed a series of armed robberies while addicted to heroin, and was sentenced to nineteen years' imprisonment. In July 1980 he escaped over the front wall of Victoria's maximum-security prison, in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.
His journey took him to New Zealand, Asia, Africa and Europe, but his home for most of those years was Bombay-where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia.
_Shantaram deals with all this, and more. It is an epic, mesmerizing tale of crowded slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films, and spiritual gurus and brutal battlefields. It weaves a seamless web of unforgettable characters, amazing adventures, and superb evocations of Indian life.
This remarkable book 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-his home, his family, and his soul-and 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.
Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, and has lived in
India, New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland. He speaks four languages and has traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Europe. He is now a full-time writer and lives in Melbourne.
Praise for Shantaram
"Shantaram is a big and big-hearted book... It's got everything you could ever want in a novel-memorable characters, tortured romances, wild comic capers in exotic locales; stories of heroism and cowardice, love and betrayal, sin and redemption...
"This vast tapestry of tales is sewn together with the skill of a master storyteller... Roberts has one hell of an imaginative gift...
"What, in the end, strikes you most about this swashbuckling and ultimately life-affirming romp of a novel is that it is also the kind the aesthetic triumph we once called-without blushing-a masterpiece."
- Cameron Woodhead, The Age
"It is a tale, by turns gripping, hilarious, moving and instructive. It evokes the raucous tangle of modern India superbly."
- Frank Campbell, The Australian
"Shantaram is not so much a mirror as a mirror ball, spinning with relentless drive, dazzling but ungras-pable. And, again, audacious. Gloriously audacious."
- Nicola Robinson, The Sydney Morning Herald
For my mother
May all those you love find the truth in you and be true to your love.