The story wasn't his, and it wasn't about him. I wanted to paint Lin into the background in Shantaram.

I like Idriss, and Concannon, and Abdullah, hey, I like them all.īut I also like Lin in this novel. He just pushed his way into the novel at version 16, and stayed all the way to version 23, becoming more likeable for me all the way along.ĭidier gets his scenes and dialogue in TMS, and he's a character I live with constantly, because he has more stories to tell in the next couple of years. I like Oleg, the smiling Russian guitar player. Not all the way, of course, because there's always a lot more of Karla to discover than she reveals. You get to understand her crazy take on things a little more. You love them all, even the characters most readers would despise. Characters are children, some of them older than you are yourself, and you can't play favourites. Do you have a favourite character in TMS?Ī. For readers who want more, I've put the uncut version of Idriss and the sages on the e-book. In TMS, the character Idriss is fully fleshed, and the philosophical component of the novels is more fully explored. At the end of Shantaram, Lin discovers that Khaderbhai had a spiritual teacher, named Idriss. Readers wanted to know if there would be more in the sequel. One of the recurrent themes in the emails I received was references to Khaderbhai's philosophy. I hope that readers who'd like to send me an email will send exactly the same positive, inspiring messages to friends, instead. The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts That's something I'll miss very much, now that I've retired from public life, and I've closed down my email accounts.

I was strongly moved many times, and I cried when I read the stories of hope and redemption that readers sent to me. It was wonderful to receive thousands of emails from readers, and I was surprised and pleased when I saw that so many of them began by saying that they'd never written to an author before. I hope that some readers will finish TMS with a strengthened sense of our common humanity. We are what we were for the first hundred thousand years of our making. But what we are inside, most of us, almost all of us, is fairness, cooperation and courageous love. Economic and social forces are acting centrifugally, flinging humanist conceptions of our kind to outer rim ecosystems of thought. The more cybernetically connected we are, the more directly disconnected we are. Second, I hope that some readers will take away a passionate and well-constructed defence of our common humanity. It's a big commitment I'm asking them to make, and I hope they feel nourished by it at the end. Well, first, I'd hope they felt entertained. Former armed robber, prison escapee, and best-selling author Gregory David Roberts in 2005.

Author gregory david roberts