Shusaku Endo is one of Japan's foremost novelists, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.
Written mostly in the form of a letter by its central character, the novel's theme of a silent God who accompanies a believer during times of adversity was greatly influenced by the Catholic Endo's experience of religious discrimination in Japan, racism in France and debilitating tuberculosis.
Silence is an extraordinarily haunting and powerful novel, deceptive in its simplicity, yet elegant and unyielding. Never moralizing yet intensely moral, like all great works of literature Silence appeals to us all to consider what it is to be a human being as we navigate our way between heaven and earth.
With an introduction by Martin Scorcese