SHANTARAM: Now a major Apple TV+ series 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." With that arresting opening, Gregory David Roberts announces himself as a writer of serious, uncommon power. This is a big novel, in every sense. Sprawling, urgent, and deeply felt, it follows Lin, a man who has broken out of a maximum-security Australian prison and reinvented himself amid the chaos of Bombay's streets. Armed with a forged passport and very little else, he disappears into a city that swallows people whole. His guide is Prabaker, warm and wily, who introduces him to a Bombay few outsiders ever see: beggars, gangsters, holy men, exiles, and everyone drifting somewhere in between. Lin eventually finds himself running a makeshift clinic in one of the city's most impoverished slums, while quietly being drawn deeper into the orbit of the local mafia. Two figures shape his fate more than any others. Khader Khan is a criminal patriarch with the bearing of a philosopher, equal parts dangerous and magnetic. Karla is harder to read, driven by secrets she keeps close, and all the more compelling for it. Roberts draws on his own life to fuel the story, and you feel that lived weight on every page. Burning slums sit alongside five-star hotels. Prison torment gives way to fleeting romance. Bollywood glitter brushes up against mujahideen warfare. It's an enormous canvas, and somehow it holds together, bound by a genuine, aching love for India. Now adapted for Apple TV+ starring Charlie Hunnam, this debut remains a startling, absorbing achievement.
- Author: Gregory David Roberts
- Publisher: Abacus
- Genre: Thrillers & Suspense
- ISBN: 978-0349117546
- Pages: 944 pages