Bryan Tookey

Shantaram has a great storyline and alternates between a) a rollicking action novel and b) a gripping travel novel and c) an ersatz philosophy guide. I found it was all over the place tonally: it didn't work for me when he'd inserted some florid metaphor about the moon dancing on the cresting waves of the Bombay coast a few pages after gouging the eye out of a Nigerian hit man. The other reason the book annoyed me was the fact that it was portrayed as being based on a true story. The sheer unlikelihood of even half the events happening to a single person means that I need more proof than the author's assertion that they events are largely true. No journalist has managed to establish that they are even partly true and I simply didn't believe him. And that ultimately frustrated me and left me wishing he'd said it is an entirely fictional account