num_pages: 944
description: In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia's most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay, he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. His debut novel, SHANTARAM, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay. The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, SHANTARAM is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.
language: English
title: Shantaram
titlecomplete: Shantaram
characters: Abdel Khader Khan, Abdullah Taheri, Lin Ford, Prabaker, Didier, Lisa, Karla Saraanen, Nazeer
genres: Fiction, Adventure, Asia, India, Novels, Travel, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Crime, Unfinished
ratings_count: 208971
places: Australia, Bombay, Afghanistan, India
series: Shantaram
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best First Book (the Pacific Region)
publisher: Little Brown & Co