The Mountain Shadow
The long-awaited sequel to Shantaram
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4.2 • 143 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A profound, unputdownable, epic thriller set in Bombay - a standalone novel and a sequel to the international bestseller Shantaram
"Roberts is brilliant at creating a sense of menace and projecting the constant tension of the escaped convict ... crucially, he is also a man who loves and understands India ... nearly 900 pages of pure escape" Sunday Times
The first glimpse of the sea on Marine Drive filled my heart, if not my head. I turned away from the red shadow. I stopped thinking of that pyramid of killers, and Sanjay's improvidence. I stopped thinking about my own part in the madness. And I rode, with my friends, into the end of everything.
Shantaram introduced millions of readers to a cast of unforgettable characters through Lin, an Australian fugitive, working as a passport forger for a branch of the Bombay mafia. In The Mountain Shadow, the long-awaited sequel, Lin must find his way in a Bombay run by a different generation of mafia dons, playing by a different set of rules.
It has been two years since the events in Shantaram, and since Lin lost two people he had come to love: his father figure, Khaderbhai, and his soul mate, Karla, married to a handsome Indian media tycoon. Lin returns from a smuggling trip to a city that seems to have changed too much, too soon. Many of his old friends are long gone, the new mafia leadership has become entangled in increasingly violent and dangerous intrigues, and a fabled holy man challenges everything that Lin thought he'd learned about love and life. But Lin can't leave the Island City: Karla, and a fatal promise, won't let him go.
Fans of Vikram Seth, John Irving and David Mitchell will love Shantaram and The Mountain Shadow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set mostly in modern Bombay, Roberts's sequel to Shantaram defies easy categorization, one of its many charms. The dashing hero Lin (short for Lindsay), an Australian fugitive, is worldly, two-fisted, rides a motorcycle, has a social conscience, quotes great writers and, as the book opens, struggles bravely to get over his lost love, Karla, who's now married to wealthy power broker Ranjit. Lin's working to forget Karla via a new girlfriend, Lisa, with bittersweet results. Lin works as a passport forger for the local crime syndicate. He narrates his interactions with many larger-than-life street types in an energetic and often salty first person. Roberts's cast of characters, while colorful, is also dauntingly large, and there's a sense of entering the story in the middle. A reader unfamiliar with the earlier novel will need some time to get grounded. To counterbalance, Roberts keeps the action moving and the narrative engaging. The sprawling and episodic plot involves minor scrapes with crime kingpins as well as local tensions between Iranian and Afghan emigres in the city. Sensing Lin's obsession with Karla, it is Lisa who engineers a reunion of the two ex-lovers. Violence ultimately shatters the love triangle, which is the strongest aspect of this strong novel. This series of robust, retro capers with contemporary trappings will have readers feverishly turning the pages.
Customer Reviews
Shantaram
Intense, revealing, honest. Life with the skin peeled back, raw.
Loved it. A long slow read with periods of haste in needing to know the result of the tryst, liaison, meeting. Philosophical, courageous & thought provoking. One of those books you sometimes are impelled to stay up til 3 in the morning or fall asleep reading then wake up and recommended the journey.
Fantastical nonsense
First off I have to start by saying I absolutely loved Shantaram, and downloaded this as soon as I’d finished that one.
I must admit that I read Shantaram believing it was an autobiography of sorts though (I’m aware there’s always some embellishment).
But when I read in interviews with the author that they were both very much novels and all characters are completely made up, it changed my whole perspective.
What seemed like an epic tale and poetic characters all around now just seems forced, exaggerated and very very cheesy.
This novel falls from fantastical into nonsensical very quickly and reads like a collection of convoluted monotonous short stories cobbled together, which then somehow all get resolved very neatly, very quickly in the end.
And almost every time Lin and Karla are the heroes.
He writes of himself in such very high regard that even sworn deadly enemies of his gang make pacts with just himself to never fight each other.
It’s also full of mass contradictions and contrivances, one of the biggest being, Karla the girl who could never love, now can not seem to stop telling him she loves him.
She’s even gone so far as to marry someone else just so she can set herself up financially to be with Shantaram in the end. Amassing millions of dollars on the way for their life together. Please.
It was a very long read and while I’m proud to say I stuck it out, for the last half of the book I just couldn’t wait for it to end, and actually had to put it down and walk away in several places due to the severe improbability or utter stupidity of the dialogue or what supposedly went on.
Very disappointing all round.
The Mountain shadow
Some moments of exquisite beauty and truth struggling to surface through a haze of violence, profanity, drugs and alcohol, all justified by the author in his “Proclaimer”in the interests of “authenticity”. Disappointing.