Long Lists - 2026-2027

Steph

Silence, Shusaku Endo (Maybe Classic - published in 1966)

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.

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)

Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know.

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.)

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, G. B. Edwards

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.

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.