This novel was recommended to me by Feralwoman who has since read it twice. I have been meaning to read it for several months, but had been preoccupied with reading fiction and non-fiction pieces that took place in Morocco in preparation for my travel there.

Upon my return home, I had difficulty in deciding what to read. I had finished reading "Prep" by Curtis Sittenfeld on the flight home. I searched my crowded bookshelves. Was I in the mood for Jose Saramago, EM Forester, a re-read of a Jane Austen novel (a little romance to lift the spirits) or was I ready for something unexpected? It struck me, perhaps it was time for "Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts.

The novel spans 900+ pages, but the pages turn fast so it doesn't feel so arduous. From the first sentence, Roberts' prose grabs you and you don't want to put the novel down! Well, except for catching a hockey playoff game () and heading out for a walk with the dogs!

At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla—and her mysterious inability to love in return—gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws.

The first lines of the novel begin: "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. I realized, 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 the 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."

A side note, a film adaptation is in pre-production starring Johnny Depp and directed by Mira Nair. Look for a 2009 release date.