Shantaram: A Novel

Some men like you less the more they owe you. Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt.

The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.

THE WORLD IS RUN by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards,’

taciturn

What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it?

refulgent

harangued

The only victory that really counts in prison, an old-timer in the Australian jail once said to me, is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living

inexorable

discernible;