Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts (English) Paperback Book

Description: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts Based directly upon the experiences of its author, this is the story of a man who escapes from prison in Australia to arrive in Bombay where he works in a first-aid station and smuggles drugs and guns. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description 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. So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombays 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 citys 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. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature. Author Biography Gregory David Roberts, the author of Shantaram and its sequel, The Mountain Shadow, was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay--where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is now a full-time writer and lives in Bombay. Review "Shantaram is a novel of the first order, a work of extraordinary art, a thing of exceptional beauty. If someone asked me what the book was about, I would have to say everything, every thing in the world. Gregory David Roberts does for Bombay what Lawrence Durrell did for Alexandria, what Melville did for the South Seas, and what Thoreau did for Walden Pond: He makes it an eternal player in the literature of the world." --Pat Conroy "Shantaram has provided me with the richest reading experience to date and I dont expect anybody to unseat its all-round performance for a long time. It is seductive, powerful, complex, and blessed with a perfect voice. Like a voodoo ghost snatcher, Gregory David Roberts has captured the spirits of the likes of Henri Charrière, Rohinton Mistry, Tom Wolfe, and Mario Vargas Llosa, fused them with his own unique magic, and built the most gripping monument in print. The land of the god Ganesh has unchained the elephant, and with the monster running amok, I tremble for the brave soul dreaming of writing a novel about India. Gregory David Roberts is a suitable giant, a dazzling guru, and a genius in full." --Moses Isegawa, author of Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit "Shantaram is, quite simply, the 1001 Arabian Nights of the new century. Anyone who loves to read has been looking for this book all their reading life. Anyone who walks away from Shantaram untouched is either heartless or dead or both. I havent had such a wonderful time in years." --Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples "Shantaram is dazzling. More importantly, it offers a lesson...that those we incarcerate are human beings. They deserve to be treated with dignity. Some of them, after all, may be exceptional. Some may even possess genius." --Ayelet Waldman, author of Crossing the Park "Utterly unique, absolutely audacious, and wonderfully wild, Shantaram is sure to catch even the most fantastic of imaginations off guard." --Elle "Shantaram had me hooked from the first sentence. [It] is thrilling, touching, frightening...a glorious wallow of a novel." --Detroit Free Press "[A] sprawling, intelligent novel...full of vibrant characters...the exuberance of his prose is refreshing...Roberts brings us through Bombays slums and opium houses, its prostitution dens and ex-pat bars, saying, You come now. And we follow." --The Washington Post "Inspired storytelling." --People "Vivid, entertaining. Its visceral, cinematic descriptive beauty truly impresses." --USA Today "Few stand out quite like Shantaram ...nothing if not entertaining. Sometimes a big story is its own best reward." --The New York Times "...very good...vast of vision and breadth." --Time Out "This massive autobiographical novel draws heavily from Roberts vida loca. Dont let the size scare you away - Shantaram is one of the most gripping tales of personal redemption youll ever read." --Giant Magazine "This reviewer is amazed that Roberts is here to write anything. Swallowed up by the abyss, somehow he crawled out intact....His love for other people was his salvation...Powerful books can change our lives. The potency of Shantaram is the joy of forgiveness. First we must regret, then forgive. Forgiveness is a beacon in the blackness." --Dayton Daily News " Shantaram is loads of colorful fun, [it] rises to something grand in its evocations of the pungent chaos of Bombay. " --Minneapolis Star Tribune "Shantaram is a true epic. It is a huge, messy, over-the-top irresistible shaggy-dog story." --The Seattle Times Review Quote Vivid, entertaining. Its visceral, cinematic descriptive beauty truly impresses. Description for Reading Group Guide THE FIRST WALL - Forgiveness, Love and The Writers Dream: A Biographical Note on the Writing of Shantaram The first wall of any prison is the one that surrounds the heart; its put inside the man, before the mans put inside the prison. Its that wall of flesh and fear that keeps men confined. And when you escape, when you break out, its the wall within yourself that you have to scale first, before you get anywhere near the one made of stone and steel. I learned that the hard way, by standing on the front wall of a maximum-security prison, between two gun-towers, at one oclock in the afternoon. I was calm, as I stood there in the long, heart-thud second before sliding down the rope to freedom -- calmer than I shouldve been with only one throw of the dice between escaping from prison and being shot dead -- because Id already climbed the big wall in my heart, and no matter what the outcome, escaped or dead, I was already damned and already free. Years later, after Id spent ten years on the run as my countrys Most Wanted Man, after Id been to two wars, and set up a clinic for the poor in a Bombay slum, and worked as a forger, counterfeiter, smuggler and gunrunner for a branch of the Bombay mafia, after Id been captured and imprisoned in Germany with Europes most notorious terrorists, after Id been extradited to Australia and put into solitary confinement for two years as a punishment for escaping, I discovered and then had to scale another wall that pride and fear and rage had built in my heart. Id written the first 300 pages of a novel, based on my life, and I returned to my cell one day, from two hours of walking the exercise cage, to find that a sadistic prison officer had torn the manuscript into fragments no bigger than a thumbnail, and used them to fill the toilet bowl to overflowing. An anger, throbbing so hard in my heart and my blood that it ached in my head, tormented me: I had to literally flush away three years of work. The inequitable cruelty of the guards actions -- I had every legal permission to write my manuscript -- was no less injurious than the blow made against my art: strike at my face, hurt my body, Ill accept it, but dont hurt my work . Resisting and denying the impulse to strike back took an effort of will that strained the whole of me, body and soul, and left me stronger, in some remote, eternal sense, and yet shudderingly diminished at the same time. When my two years in solitary ended, I was transferred to maximum security, where I had to serve out the remaining four years of my sentence. After receiving permission once again, I began work on the second draft of the manuscript. Three-and-a-half years and 350 pages later, I returned from work in a prison factory to find that the second draft of the novel had also been destroyed, with fragments of my work scattered throughout my cell and out onto the prison tier. I sat down on the bed in my cell, surrounded by the pieces of my heart, and I recalled the two times Id been tortured in an Indian prison, during the years that I was on the run. I remembered that the first time Id been chained face-up, lying on my back, so that I could see the men who were taking turns in teams to torture me. I remembered looking the men in the eye one by one, until my own eyes were too filled with blood, and sending them the message: Yes, I see you, Ill remember you, Ill get you, one way or another, Ill get you for this ... And then I recalled the second systematic, torturous beating, two months after the first -- face down, that time, so that I couldnt see the men, the many men, the twenty men who took turns to whip and slash my body with razored bamboo canes. I remembered struggling to lift my face from the muck as my arms were stretched out and chained beside me. I remembered thinking that I might drown in my own blood and tears, and then finding myself in the moment of that choking, drowning thought floating above my own body. It was as if Id had an artists view of my own stripped and bloodied self, and of the men whose arms rose and fell and rose again, and fell again, in the frantic jazz of the flogging. And last, and strongest of those memories was the thought that had claimed me, and saved me, and freed me in that floating moment: Let it go. Forgive them. Let it go, if you want to live ... I found the prison officer whod destroyed the second draft of my book. I told him that I forgave him. He didnt believe me, at first. He was expecting violence, and he braced himself for a fight. I told him that I thought I knew where cruelty such as his came from, that Id learned something about it in the years that Id been on the run. I told him that cruelty begins as an agony in the self, before its inflicted on others, and I felt sorry that such an agony existed in his heart. I also told him that I wanted to thank him. He was still wary, still suspecting a trick that might lure him in close enough for a head-butt or a thumb in the eye. He snarled at me. You want to thank me, do ya ? I did. I thanked him for giving me the chance to scale the high wall in my angry heart and test my capacity for forgiveness -- if I could forgive that destruction of six years work, I could forgive just about anything -- and I wanted to thank him for making the book a better novel. And it is: Shantaram changed as a result of that destruction, and its a far more complex book, for its long, agonised gestation period, than it ever wouldve been had they just let me write it from the first draft. And the prison officer, who expected to be attacked that day, changed as well. He looked down at his polished boots when I finished talking, and mumbled: Im sorry. I dont know why I done it. I shouldnt have done it. I dont know why I did. Im sorry. Im sorry ... The coda to this account of having my manuscript destroyed twice in prison is that I met that prison officer again, just recently, while I was speaking at the Writers Festival in Melbourne. He approached me after Id addressed an audience on the very theme of Forgiveness as a Literary Virtue , and told me that hed changed his life in ways that resembled the changes occurring in mine. Hed left the prison service, soon after the incident where hed destroyed my novel. In the years that followed, hed enrolled in a course of night-school classes that brought him to study literature, as an adult student at university. We hugged. He cried. And I signed, with no little love and passioned thanks, his copy of the book hed once destroyed. Details ISBN0312330537 Author Gregory David Roberts Short Title SHANTARAM Pages 944 Language English ISBN-10 0312330537 ISBN-13 9780312330538 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2005 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Alternative 9781605149219 Imprint St Martins Press Series St. Martins Press DOI 10.1604/9780312330538 Subtitle A Novel AU Release Date 2005-10-01 NZ Release Date 2005-10-01 US Release Date 2005-10-01 UK Release Date 2005-10-01 Publisher St Martins Press Publication Date 2005-10-01 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43651263;

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