Silence: A Novel [Paperback]

Shusaku Endo's classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times,soon to be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver

SilenceI regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama. -The New York Review of Books

Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endo is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, andSilenceis widely considered to be his great masterpiece.

Shusaku Endo, born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize, and was widely considered the greatest Japanese novelist of his time.

Somber, delicate, and startlingly empathetic.  John Updike

One of the best historical novels by anyone, ever.  David Mitchell, author ofCloud AtlasandThe Bone Clocks

I think about Silence, and Endos work more generally, all the time.  Phil Klay, author ofRedeploymentand Winner of the 2014 National Book Award

Silence was in the back of my mind the whole time I was working [on Boxers & Saints]. When I got stuck, I would close my eyes and ask for Endos intercelY