"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," says Lin, in this fictionalised account of the author's life.

The narrator, Lin, is an escaped convict from an Australian jail. He arrives in Bombay, India with a fake New Zealand passport. He immediately meets a taxi driver named Prabaker who gives him tours of the city and a hut in the local slum. Lin starts a free clinic for the people in the slum, and to provide for his own income sells drugs to tourists. This gets him the attention of the local mafia, and he's increasingly pulled into their world of crime- from counterfeiting to gun running to passport schemes. And as a gunrunner he resupplied a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan.

The story of "Shantaram" is the story of Roberts's own life. He really did break out of a maximum-security prison in Australia, travel the world, become fluent in several Indian dialects, get captured and returned to jail, only to be victimized by sadistic prison guards who twice destroyed the first 300 pages of his manuscript.

I like this novel because of the originality in Robert's writing and some of his philisophies he propound in his book.

The film rights have recently been sold to Johnny Depp and Warner Bros are set to produce Shantaram as a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Johnny Depp. As of June 2006, director Peter Weir dropped out of the project and Warner Bros hopes to mount production by spring 2007.