Silence

by Shusaku Endo, William Johnston (Translator), Martin Scorsese (Foreword by)

Overview

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 Times Book Review

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 Endois 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250082244
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Series:	Picador Classics
Edition description:	Media Tie-in
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	56,927
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.15(h) x 0.65(d)
Lexile:	870L (what's this?)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

Endo was a Catholic, but you don't have to be one to find the novel really thought-provoking, and moving, and involving. It's a great book. It's a great historical novel....The characters are complex, and multi-layered, and flawed. Their motives are messy and tangled, like our motives are messy and tangled. It's a great achievement, and I love the book.

author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas David Mitchell

08/01/2015
One of Japan's most distinguished 20th-century writers, Endo wrote from a Catholic perspective. This masterwork concerns a young Portuguese missionary in 17th-century Japan, when Christians there were persecuted. It was published in 1966 and translated in 1969; this reissue accompanies Martin Scorsese's forthcoming film adaptation, starring Andrew Garfield.

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