Starring Charlie Hunnam as Lin, the fake name chosen by Roberts after his escape (and which, we’re told often, means “penis” in Hindi), it’s a little bit disorganized, a little bit confusing, and mostly fun.

If all of this sounds jumbled yet intriguing, congratulations, because you are in the right frame of mind to consume the Apple TV+ adaptation, also called Shantaram. “It doesn’t matter how much of it is true or not to me,” Roberts has said, “it’s how true they are to all of us, and to our common humanity.” Importantly, Shantaram is a novel, not an autobiography, despite the fact that the main character is a man very much like himself who escapes an Australian prison and flees to India. Back in his home country, and back in prison, he began to write the novel Shantaram, which was apparently destroyed by guards twice before he was released six years later. When he finally got caught, he escaped from Australia’s Pentridge Prison and managed to flee to India, where he spent 10 years before he was captured trying to smuggle himself into Germany. This is a man who was known in his younger days as “the gentleman bandit” for his polite demeanor when he robbed banks to support his heroin habit.

He wasn’t familiar to me, anyway, but spend a moment on his Wikipedia page and your curiosity will be piqued. Gregory David Roberts is one of the most interesting men you’ve never heard of.

David roberts shantaram