The Great Escape

Published in 2003, Shantaram follows an Australian heroin addict who breaks out of Pentridge Prison in 1980, buys a fake passport, and vanishes into Mumbai. The author, Gregory David Roberts, lived a version of that story himself. While he was locked up, guards destroyed his manuscript twice — and both times he wrote the whole thing again from memory.

That stubborn persistence is the key to the whole book. A man who refuses to let a wrecked manuscript end his story writes about a hero built from the same material: someone who treats every setback as the start of the next chapter, not the end of his.