Shantaram Themes

The hero of Shantaram, narrator Linbaba, gets into lots of pickles in his international fugitive story. Almost all of them involve some kind of betrayal or other. Whether he's being thrown into jai...

The Australian narrator, Lin, has a real knack for language, and it's a good thing. Shantaram takes place in India, Afghanistan, Australia, and all points in between. Whether he's picking up Hindi...

Shantaram is made up of the stories of some grand friendships between very different characters. Lin, an Australian fugitive who turns up in Bombay one day, must rely on the strangers he meets to f...

Ah, the sweet taste of revenge to go with your morning chai. Shantaram is full of double-crosses, and so it should come as no surprise that revenge takes center stage, as well. The narrator is quic...

Casual drug and alcohol use shows up constantly in the pages of Shantaram. The fact that a seedy bar is the characters' favorite hangout doesn't really help matters, and the abundance of marihuana...

Bust out the iced coffee (and a beret if you have on handy)—the long philosophical discussions of right, wrong, and living a principled life can get a little bit overwhelming in Shantaram. On the...

It's inescapable: the utter desperation of most of Bombay's citizens living situations. Whether they're sleeping on sidewalks or in slums, being turned away from hospitals or rounded up by the cops...

When your narrator's an escaped convict who falls right into a counterfeiting and money-laundering ring, you know that criminality will be an important aspect of the novel. And Shantaram doesn't di...

When you've escaped from a maximum security prison and crossed an ocean as a fugitive, it's not easy to get back home. And that's the situation of Lin, the narrator of Shantaram, who not only can't...

Bombay, the city in which Shantaram takes place, is a chaotic hustle-bustle full of intense sights, sounds, and smells. The descriptions of the heat will make you sweat; the descriptions of the foo...