Shantaram is an epic story spanning more than a decade of life on the run, large in every way – over 900 pages, real not only because it was, but also by the gifted writer at the helm, who’s talent and awesome ability leap forth from the first page and that promise of great holds through with the novel’s end. It is a masterpiece; intelligent, thrilling, romantic, philosophical, humor and outright horror – Shantaram has it all!

Greg is now on the run, after breaking out of prison in Australia where he was convicted of armed robbery while under the influence of drugs, his life on the run takes him from New Zealand to Bombay India, where the story starts. Using an alias to enter Bombay, ‘Lindsay’ attaches himself to a group of tourists to pass customs and immediately is met by a young man claiming to be Bombay’s best city guide, the unforgettable Prabaker. ‘Lindsay’ meets and befriends so many wonderfully engaging vivid people that populate this story; he joins the Indian mafia and is enthralled with and loved by its leader, exploring the father/son philosopher/student relationship pondering good and evil, man and God. And he falls in love Karla, the eloquent words of love and loss Greg writes of, as he learns of life and who and what kind of man he is and struggles to become while he struggles to survive on the run, is exciting memorizing enthralling, a story to read and savor! Shantaram resonates long after you have read the last page.

Shantaram is a thriller of the highest order; a love story profound and penetrating, cut bloody with truth, seen through the eyes of a poet philosopher gangster, a man on the run.

On the book’s front cover “He was Australia’s most wanted man. Now he’s written Australia’s most wanted novel”.

excerpt from SHANTARAM by Gregory David Roberts

'It too me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choice we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in that flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed and starved. I went to war. I ran into enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.

But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt me the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else -- with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.'