14 Books Like Shantaram: Bombay Epics and the True Stuff

Inspector Sartaj Singh takes a phone tip, drives to a strange white bunker in the suburbs, and finds Ganesh Gaitonde, the city's most wanted man, sealed inside and willing to talk. The novel splits from there: Sartaj working the case through police stations, informers and municipal paperwork, and Gaitonde narrating his own climb from nothing. Chandra writes the whole city into it, from film financiers to bomb plots to what a constable eats for lunch, and he does it without ever slowing down. It is long the way a television season is long, not the way homework is long.

The book opens on Shuklaji Street, in a room where a pipe is being prepared, and the first sentence goes on for pages. From there it moves between the regulars of one opium den: the man who runs the pipes, a hijra named Dimple who becomes the heart of the whole thing, a Chinese exile, a painter, a killer. Then heroin arrives, the gentleness of opium is replaced by something meaner, and the city turns with it. Thayil is a poet and it shows in the sentences and in the shape, which loops instead of progressing. Very little plot, an enormous amount of atmosphere.

A widow trying to keep a tailoring business alive takes in two tailors from a village and a student boarder. The year is 1975, the Emergency has just been declared, and the machinery of the state begins arriving in their lives: slum clearance, forced sterilisation, the police, the beggar-master. Mistry writes the four of them so well that you catch yourself planning their futures for them. Then the book does what it was always going to do. This is the most upsetting novel I have finished, and I would still put it into anybody's hands, because the friendship at the centre is written with more tenderness than the cruelty around it.

Saleem Sinai is born at midnight on 15 August 1947, one of a thousand and one children born in that first hour, every one of them with a strange gift. His is telepathy, which lets him convene the others inside his head. Around that fantasy Rushdie writes India from the last years of the Raj through to the Emergency, moving between Bombay, Kashmir, Karachi and Dhaka in a voice that never once stops talking. It is funny, boastful, exhausting and enormous. You either surrender to the sentences in the first thirty pages or you will fight the book for six hundred.

Richard is in a Khao San Road guest house when the stranger in the next room gives him a hand-drawn map and then kills himself. The map leads to a hidden lagoon inside a Thai marine park where a few dozen travellers have built a community out of fish, dope and no outside world. The first half is the fantasy working beautifully. The second half is the fantasy going wrong the way these things always go wrong, slowly and then very fast indeed. Garland was in his twenties when he wrote it, and it moves like a thriller while quietly taking apart the backpacker hunt for somewhere real.

Ram Mohammad Thomas has no education and no money, and he has just answered twelve questions correctly on national television, so the police assume fraud. The structure is the entire trick: one chapter per question, each one a piece of his life that happened to teach him that particular answer. A church orphanage, a film star's flat, a Delhi brothel, a train, a gun. The chapters work as short stories and the frame gives them momentum. This became the film Slumdog Millionaire, and the novel underneath is looser, angrier and considerably less romantic.

Mehta returns to the city he left as a teenager and reports it from inside: a Shiv Sena rioter who will describe exactly how he burned people, a hitman who talks about the work the way anybody talks about a job, a bar dancer whose economics are more brutal than any novel would risk, a policeman known for encounters, and the film industry, where Mehta ends up writing a script himself. He never stands outside any of it. The result is strange, sad and angry, reading sometimes like a thriller and sometimes like a confession.

Boo spent years in a settlement of a few hundred huts on airport land, following a family whose teenage son makes a living sorting recyclable rubbish, a woman running local politics out of her hut, a girl studying for a degree nobody in her family has ever held. Then a neighbour's death brings the police and the courts down on all of them. Every scene comes from interviews, public records and video, and there is a note at the back explaining exactly how each one was assembled. It reads like fiction, and that is the achievement, because none of it is.

Faleiro met Leela in a Mira Road dance bar and kept showing up for years, through the 2005 ban that closed the bars and pushed thousands of women into work with far less protection. The book stays inside Leela's own account of her life: the money, the customers, the police, the mother, and the strict internal hierarchy of what counts as respectable inside a world that nobody outside considers respectable at all. It is short, it is built like a novel, and Faleiro never pretends to be an insider. What she does is keep listening until the performance drops.

Saviano grew up in the province of Naples and writes the Camorra as a business: container ships arriving at the port, textile workshops making designer clothes through the night, waste companies burying toxic drums under farmland, a housing estate so well suited to dealing that it might as well have been designed for it. The style keeps switching between reporting, memoir and something closer to a rant, and he puts himself into scenes on a scooter watching bodies get collected. It is a book written in anger and it is better for the anger.

Dalrymple and his wife rent a flat in Delhi in the late eighties and spend a year there with a landlady, a taxi driver and an inexhaustible supply of curiosity. Each chapter reaches further back: the refugees of 1947, the British destruction after 1857, the Sufis, the Mughals, the seven cities buried under the current one. The present-day comedy is genuinely funny, and the history is carried by people he goes out and meets, from families who remember the walled city before the trains to men who claim descent from the old court.

Frater grew up in the New Hebrides watching his father wait for rain, and decided to follow the Indian monsoon from its arrival on the Kerala coast to Cherrapunji in the north east. What he gets is a portrait of a country organised around water: meteorologists making the most consequential forecast in the world, farmers reading the sky, Bombay crowds walking into the first shower on purpose, and officials who will not give him the permit he needs. It is old-fashioned travel writing, which means trains, strangers, long conversations, and jokes at his own expense.

Charriere was convicted of a murder he always denied and shipped to French Guiana in the nineteen thirties. The book is his account of the next thirteen years: the transport ship, the islands, two years in a solitary cell that he survived by walking it out step by step, a spell living with an indigenous community, a leper colony, and finally a jump off a cliff on Devil's Island. It moves like an adventure novel and reads like one, which is both the whole problem and the reason nobody can put it down.

Set two years after Shantaram ends, with the same narrator back in Bombay, still working for the same criminal council, still surrounded by people who speak entirely in aphorisms. There is a plot involving forged passports, a rival gang and a guru on a mountain, but it takes hundreds of pages to move an inch, and the philosophy that was a spice in the first book has become the main course. The Bombay writing is still good in places and the fights still work. Everything in between has doubled in length and lost its urgency.