Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Part travelogue, part love letter, part autobiography, Shantaram is a vivid, entertaining but slightly grandiose tale of Lin, an ex-junkie and convicted robber who escapes from an Australian prison then hides in the most alien of places: the hot, filthy, decadent, seaside metropolis of Bombay.

Shantaram is no wide-eyed backpacker's Lonely Planet travel guide. Instead, it could double as a guidebook for a fugitive who needs to disappear, counterfeit passport in hand.

Or it could just be a fun read for someone committed enough to stay with this lengthy, impossibly heavy book.

Lin is introduced as he steps off a plane with a new identity. Only the punishing Bombay heat is there to greet him. He is instantly intrigued by the city just as it is by him. He is gawked at by locals for being a gora (white), and he can't get enough of the never-ending cacophony of the city's life pulse.

Prabaker, an energetic and sometimes irritating city guide, is the first to greet the newly free runaway. He also is one of the book's most innocent and refreshing characters. It is on one of his city tours that Lin first encounters the Bombay that tourists never see: the sprawling slums, the crowded local trains, the street hustlers and the quiet, stubborn dignity of people who own almost nothing.

From there the novel widens into a sprawling adventure. Lin sets up a free clinic in the slum, falls in with the city's underworld, falls in love with the enigmatic Karla, and survives Arthur Road jail. Roberts writes Bombay the way Dickens wrote London: as a living character with a pulse of its own, generous and brutal in the same breath.

Is every word true? Roberts himself has said the novel is fiction built on a life genuinely lived, and the line between the two is part of the fun. What is certainly true is the book's staying power. Seven years after its publication, Shantaram still reads like the Bombay novel against which all other Bombay novels are measured: big, sentimental, violent, tender, and impossible to put down once it gets its hooks in you.