Gregory David Roberts Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide

Gregory David Roberts has published two novels, both massive in scale and set in the Bombay underworld — an escaped Australian convict’s immersive portrait of a city that claimed him completely.

Shantaram is one of the most extraordinary debut novels of the early 21st century: a 936-page epic of crime, philosophy, love, and the overwhelming life of Bombay. Read it first.

Start with Shantaram — the essential first volume and a remarkable work of fiction in its own right.

Both Novels in Order

The Novels

Shantaram ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — Start here

Lin, an escaped Australian convict, arrives in Bombay with a false passport and falls into the city’s embrace: the slums, the criminal underworld, a local mafia, and a cast of characters of extraordinary vividness. One of the most immersive portraits of Bombay (now Mumbai) in fiction, and one of the most extraordinary debut novels of the 21st century. Read the full review →

The Mountain Shadow ⭐⭐⭐

The sequel — Lin, older and still in Bombay, navigating the same underworld with the same combination of violence, philosophy, and loyalty. More of what made Shantaram compelling, for readers who want to return. Read the full review →

From Fugitive to Novelist

Few writers bring to their fiction a life as extraordinary as Gregory David Roberts brought to his. An Australian who became a heroin addict and then an armed robber, Roberts was sentenced to a long prison term, escaped, and fled to Bombay, where he spent years living in the city’s slums and its criminal underworld before he was eventually recaptured and served out his sentence. Shantaram draws directly on this remarkable and harrowing experience, transmuting the raw material of a fugitive’s years in Bombay into a sprawling, semi-autobiographical novel. The book’s authority and its vividness derive from this foundation in lived experience, for Roberts is writing not from research or imagination alone but from the memory of a life lived at the extremes, in addiction, crime, flight, and the teeming reality of the Bombay underworld. The famous account of the novel’s composition only deepens its legend: Roberts is said to have written early drafts in prison, drafts that were destroyed by guards, requiring him to begin again. Whatever the precise truth of these accounts, the connection between the author’s extraordinary life and his fiction is the central fact of his work, lending Shantaram its peculiar power and authenticity. For the reader, this fusion of life and fiction is much of the appeal, the sense of a novel rooted in genuine and extreme experience, written by a man who had lived the addiction, crime, flight, and underworld survival that fill its pages. Roberts is the rare novelist whose life rivals his fiction in drama, and whose work draws its power from that extraordinary life.

The Bombay of Shantaram

At the heart of Roberts’s fiction is the city of Bombay, rendered with an intensity and an intimacy that have made Shantaram for many readers the definitive novel of the city’s teeming underworld. Roberts knew Bombay not as a visitor but as one who had lived in its slums, worked in its illicit economies, and immersed himself in the life of its streets, and his fiction captures the city with the authority of this lived knowledge. The Bombay of Shantaram is a vast and vivid world, encompassing the slums and the criminal underworld, the gangsters and the slum-dwellers, the foreigners adrift in the city and the Indians whose lives intersect with theirs, all rendered with a richness of detail and a depth of feeling that bring the city overwhelmingly to life. The novel is, among other things, a great act of homage to Bombay, capturing its energy, its squalor, its humanity, and its endless variety with the intensity of one who has lived it from within. This vivid rendering of the city is among the deepest sources of the novel’s appeal, immersing the reader in a Bombay few outsiders could know, the city of the slums and the underworld experienced from the inside. Roberts also weaves through his portrait of Bombay a strain of philosophical reflection, for Shantaram is not merely an adventure but a meditation on suffering, love, exile, and meaning, the reflections of a man seeking redemption in the teeming life of the city. The Bombay of Shantaram, vivid and intimate, is the novel’s great achievement and its lasting power.

One Story Across Two Volumes

Gregory David Roberts’s published fiction consists essentially of one long story told across two substantial volumes, Shantaram and its sequel The Mountain Shadow, which together constitute his life’s work and the literary record of his extraordinary Bombay years. Shantaram, published in 2003, is the essential book and the starting point, the sprawling and vivid novel that made his name and that captures the fullness of his Bombay experience. The Mountain Shadow, published more than a decade later in 2015, continues the story, returning to the world and characters of the first novel and extending the narrative further. Together the two books form a single vast narrative, the literary transmutation of Roberts’s years in the Bombay underworld, and they constitute the body of work on which his reputation rests. For the reader, the path through Roberts’s fiction is clear: Shantaram is the essential and the starting point, the masterwork that captures the fullness of his vision and experience, and the book that every reader should begin with. The Mountain Shadow is the continuation, recommended for those who have read and loved Shantaram and wish to return to its world and follow the story further, though it is generally regarded as the lesser of the two, lacking some of the freshness and power of the first novel. The two volumes together tell the single great story of Roberts’s Bombay years, and the reader who begins with Shantaram will find in it the fullness of his distinctive vision, the vivid Bombay and the philosophical reflection that have made it, for many readers, an unforgettable and singular novel.

Also see

• Where to Start with Gregory David Roberts
• Books About India

For the full Gregory David Roberts bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Gregory David Roberts author page on Editors Reads.

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