Silence

Must-Read Japanese Fiction Sale

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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

Silence I 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, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.

"I think about Silence, and Endo's work more generally, all the time.: Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Winner of the 2014 National Book Award

"Silence was in the back of my mind the whole time I was working [on Boxers and Saints]. When I got stuck, I would close my eyes and ask for Endo's intercession." Gene Luen Yang, MacArthur Fellow and author of Boxers and Saints

"All of Endo's work has been influential. He truly understands what it means to be both of — and not of — a place." Caryl Phillips, Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning author of The Lost Child

"Thought-provoking and moving…Complex and multilayered…[Silence] is a great achievement, and I love the book." David Mitchell, author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas

"[A] masterwork." Library Journal

"Somber, delicate, and startlingly empathetic." John Updike

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.

William Johnston, MA (Dub) Solicitor, has been a partner in Arthur Cox for 30 years, is a former chair of the Banking Law Division of the International Bar Association and is external examiner in Banking Law for the Law Society.

Martin Scorsese was born in New York City and graduated from New York University with a degree in film. Widely considered one the best filmmakers in American history, his movies include Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, Cape Fear, and Gangs of New York.