Shantaram is easily the biggest book by an unknown Australian author ever published.
: : Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts committed a series of 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 Mumbai — 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 Mumbai mafia.
: : Shantaram deals with all this, and more. It is an epic, mesmerising 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.
: : 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.
