"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." This is how Shantaram opens, a novel by author G.D. Roberts, based on his own experiences.
After being convicted of a series of robberies committed to support his heroin habit, he was jailed in an Australian maximum security prison and sentenced to nineteen years. In 1980, he escaped over the prison’s front wall and became one of the most wanted men in Australia at the time. For the next ten years he eluded the authorities, living for most of that time in Bombay, where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for the Bombay mafia.
Read an Excerpt from the Novel
Read the opening pages of Shantaram here: Shantaram - NYTimes.com (first chapters)
- What do you get to know about the narrator?
CC BY-SAWritten by: Åse Elin Langeland.
Last revised date 10/12/2018