He divides his time between Geneva and Bombay. In Bombay he has established a charitable trust to care for the poorest of the poor slum-dwellers. Gregory David Roberts is now a full-time writer, film producer, and international public speaker. It is a compelling tale of a hunted man who had lost everything – his home, his family, and his soul – and came to find his humanity while living at the wildest edge of experience.ĭo you know there is a sequel? The Moutain Shadow It can be read as a vast, extended thriller, as well as a superbly written meditation on the nature of good and evil. His book is a blend of vivid dialogue, unforgettable characters, amazing adventures, and superb evocations of Indian life. This is the setting of Shantaram.Īpart from having this highly unusual personal background, Greg Roberts is a very gifted writer. He set up a free health clinic in the slums, acted in Bollywood movies, worked for the Bombay mafia as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler and, as a gun-runner, resupplied a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan.

For most of this period he lived in Bombay. Not a memoir but a roman a clef, the story has Roberts, an escaped. In July 1980 he escaped from Victoria's maximum-security prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years. What Were Reading Now An exotic, epic adventure you can completely lose yourself in. In 1978 Roberts was sentenced to nineteen years imprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building-society branches, credit unions, and shops he had committed while addicted to heroin. Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory David Roberts.

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.

Gregory david roberts books