Shantaram
A Novel
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4.4 • 222 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For a time, Gregory David Roberts—the Gentleman Bandit—was Australia’s most wanted fugitive. Shantaram is a boisterous novel based on Roberts’ stranger-than-fiction life story, charting his arrival in India with a contraband passport and his complicated love affair with that country and its people. Almost every page of this cult classic turned global bestseller contains a description or event that takes your breath away. Spanning years and continents, Roberts’ novel has the scale of a Homeric epic and the wild energy of a whirling dervish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. . There should be plenty of media interest in the book and its author, and its sheer heft will make it stand out in bookstores.
Customer Reviews
A wonderful lasting surprise
An amazing book that has several life lessons. It is written with such authenticity that I can’t help but wonder if the author lived some of the stories. You have to feel some of that pain to know it. Shantaram will definitely be in my top 10 for a long long time.
amazing book
get ready for a ride reading this book. You will remember this book years after reading. Loved it!!!!!!
Shantaram
After catching my breath after reading some 1400 pages in less than a week, I had to Google Gregory David Roberts. I found out that what I read was basically based on true events, it took this mastermind 13 years to write this book, and-Thank God-a sequel is coming.
Rarely have I read a book that has been full of every possible scenario, one that appeals to every possible sense and emotion, one which could draw me in,throughout. There is philosophy in this book to no end. As I read it, I constantly wanted to text excerpts from the book to my wife and children. I started to make notes of interesting passages, and found that if I continued, I would write a book myself.
I just dug in and enjoyed this book immensely. I can't wait to buy the gal that suggested it to me a nice big drink-it was exquisitely incredible. Read this book!