Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

I finally read Shantaram, I heard lots of great things about it and found it in the first book shop I went to looking for it. It's a bit intimidating for someone like me, its 933 pages with relatively small font. Once I started it, I devoured it. It's based on a true story, in the 1980's the author escaped from a prison in Australia and moved to Bombay. The book is about his time there, the people he met, adventures he had and details of the Bombay underworld. I'm not sure which details are true, but the suspense and story telling is soo good. He talks about visiting the Maharashtran country side where he picks up Marathi, gives great descriptions of everything from the way people "wiggle" their heads to the details about someone's face or personality. The writing is very poetic and it would be a great novel to have to read in an English class. He talks a lot of love, pain, philosophy, fear, suffering, faith, trust, pretty much any human emotion or trait. There's plenty of humor as well. I'm going to have to read it again and mark the passages I really enjoyed.

Here's a good one:

"Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city. I'd lost Prabakar and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them."

"He hadn't said anything to me about Parvati, one of Kumar's two pretty daughters, but I'd seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker's way of courtship, a young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day's gift."