Steph
Silence, Shusaku Endo (Maybe Classic - published in 1966)
Explores themes about:
- the silence of God: The central emotional and spiritual question is why God remains silent while innocent people suffer terribly for their faith.
- Apostasy vs. True Compassion: Endō explores whether outwardly denying one's faith under duress is a cowardly betrayal or a supreme act of love and sacrifice for one's fellow human beings.
- The Cultural Soil of Japan: The novel reflects Endō's lifelong exploration of whether Western Christianity can take root in Japanese culture, or if the "swamp" of Japanese soil fundamentally alters or rejects it.
Made into a motion picture in 2016, directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Adam Driver, Liam Neesan, and Andrew Garfield.
A Heart So White, Javier Marias
- Premio de la Critica de Narrative Castellana (1992)
- Dublin Literary Award (1997)
Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence.
Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)
G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously in 1981, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, G. B. Edwards
Renowned authors John Fowles and William Golding hailed it as a twentieth-century masterpiece for its authentic, powerful narrative voice.
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 2024
- Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, HuffPost, Medium, Library Journal
“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize
“Compulsively readable, universally relevant, and deeply resonant . . . in equal parts beautiful and urgent.”—The New York Times Book Review
Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre.
From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.
