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The Mountain Shadow Part-2
A breath of Bombay hope, in the first glimpse of the sea, on Marine Drive, filled my heart, if not my head. I turned away from the red shadow. I stopped thinking of that pyramid of killers and Sanjays recklessness. I stopped thinking about my own part in the madness. And I rode, with my friends, into the end of everything. The end of the eighties was the beginning of everything. The Berlin wall fell on an empire and the Taliban took Afghanistan. Lin, on the run after escaping from prison in Australia, working as a passport forger for a Bombay mafia gang, finds himself standing on a tattered corner of a bloody carpet that would soon cover most of the world. But he cant leave the Island City-not without Karla. Two years after the events in Shantaram, Bombay is a different world, playing by different rules. Lins search for love and faith leads him through secret and violent intrigues to the dangerous truth. A love story told with hope and humor, a personal struggle for redemption and a philosophical quest for the wisdom of our common humanity, The Mountain Shadow is a sublime novel and an all-consuming, epic thriller.
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Shantaram
Abacus March 24, 2005, London, 2005. Binding is Paperback. Book Condition: Near Fine. A tight unmarked crisp softcover edition. 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.