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Gregory David Roberts’ cult hit Shantaram (Abacus) is available in audiobook for the first time from today (26th June).
The 944-page book, first published in the UK in 2005, has sold more than one million copies on the Little, Brown/Abacus list alone, according to the publisher.
The audiobook is unabridged and comes in at 42 hours and 59 minutes.
Shantaram, Roberts’ debut, is based on his experiences of life on the run in the Bombay underworld, and has sold 398,994 copies through Nielsen BookScan.
Earlier this year, Roberts said that he hoped his new book, The Mountain Shadow, which he has been working on for more than a decade, would be released at the end of this year, although no date has yet been confirmed by Abacus.
In a post this month on his Facebook page, he gave more details, saying that he used pictures of “actors, a sculptor, a designer and a sportsman to paint the faces of my fictional characters”.
He continued: “The Mountain Shadow is a very different novel to Shantaram. The pace is much faster, the dialogue is funnier, kinda like the truth in pyjamas, and more directly intimate, the action is aplenty, all the stuff I reserved for this novel when I was writing Shantaram, and the conversation between the narrator, Lin, and the readers, you guys, is tighter, tougher, and much more profound. Well, at least, that’s what I’m aiming for in this evolved GDR style.”