A Jesuit missionary and a Buddhism tag are sharing one page here, and they cannot both be describing the audiobook on offer. The title field reads Silence. The byline reads Thich Nhat Hanh. The description underneath talks about a winner of the 1966 Tanizaki Prize, a work of historical fiction about a priest sent to seventeenth century Japan, and it calls the book Endo's supreme achievement. Every written response that says anything at all agrees with the description and not with the byline. Seven hours and thirty-nine minutes of something is being sold on this listing, and the fields will not tell you whose Silence it is.
First, the Big Picture
Endo turns up in the description and twice more in the review column, and never once in the author field. The most detailed of the written responses, filed in May 2011, lays the plot out without hedging: a seventeenth century Portuguese priest, Father Rodrigues, sails to Japan to ease the suffering of Catholics who were being driven underground and killed, and to investigate the reported apostasy of another priest, Father Ferreira, whom that response describes as a real historical figure. That is a summary of the book the description sells. It is not a summary of anything the byline promises, and no field on this record reconciles the two.
So the practical question is not whether the novel is any good. The question is which file plays when the payment clears. The copy carries its own small wreckage, a stray quotation mark stranded mid sentence where two pieces of borrowed praise were spliced together, which tells you roughly how much care went into assembling the page. Audible Studios sits in the publisher slot, the release date reads December 2008, and David Holt is the single name in the reader field. None of that settles the contradiction. The honest advice is to confirm the edition with the seller before paying, and to treat the byline as the least reliable thing on display.
What Makes Silence Worth Hearing
Faith under state pressure is the subject, and the copy does not soften it. A novel of historical fiction, it says, about the persecution that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion, controversial ever since it first appeared, taking on the thorniest religious questions of belief head on. The Tanizaki Prize is the one credential offered, and the description repeats the claim that this ranks among the twentieth century's finest novels. For anyone who wants a long argument with God rather than a consoling read, that framing matches what the column underneath actually describes, which is rarer on a page this confused than you might expect.
The January 2020 five-star is where the theological weight becomes visible. It opens with a spoiler warning, because in that reader's judgment the ending cannot be separated from the argument, and it then frames the whole book as a challenge to the way Christians think about martyrdom. Catholics make saints of their martyrs, that response says, starting with the very first of them, and the novel puts a priest in the position of choosing. A five-star filed from Mexico in November 2017 arrives at the same place by another road, calling the prose delicious, the plot free of any stagnation, and the ending one of the most devastating in existence. Neither reads like a casual reaction.
A Few Reservations
One rating is what the counter admits to, and the badge above it reads 4.6. A single whole-star vote can only produce a whole number, so the average on display was calculated somewhere other than the column a buyer can read. Five written entries sit beneath that counter, four more than it acknowledges. The gap is the plainest evidence that this record pools more than one edition of the same title under one badge, and the consequence is simple: the star figure tells you nothing dependable about this particular recording.
What those entries are actually grading is worth a minute of your attention. The one-star filed from Spain in June 2019 says the binding quality is terrible and does not recommend it, which is a verdict on a physical object that no recording can be held responsible for. The entry filed from India in February 2025 carries a five-star grade, a one-word headline and no text whatsoever. Two of the five, then, assess neither a text nor a performance, and one of them is pulling the average down for a reason connected to glue rather than to prose.
Format is the last thing to check, and it is thin. The runtime is given as seven hours and thirty-nine minutes, David Holt is the only performer named anywhere on the page, and no chapter breakdown or content guidance is attached to any field. That last absence carries more weight than usual with this subject, because the story the description tells involves believers hunted and killed for what they profess, and a priest confronted with the question of whether to renounce his own faith to stop it. Anyone who needs that flagged in advance will not find it flagged here.
Should You Listen to Silence?
Listeners who came for the Endo novel described in the copy are the natural audience, particularly anyone drawn to historical fiction that treats belief as a genuine problem rather than a costume. The three responses that engage with the writing at all agree on its seriousness: one calls the ending essential to understanding the whole book, another calls it among the most devastating ever written, and the third describes a priest's voyage and suffering in enough detail to prove it was read closely. Readers of Catholic history and of Japan's closed centuries will recognize the territory immediately.
Give it a miss if the Buddhism tag is the reason you clicked. Nothing in the description points toward contemplative material of the sort the author field implies, and anyone expecting quiet practice will meet a Jesuit mission, a state persecution and a crisis of conscience instead. Give it a miss too if you need certainty about what you are buying before you buy, because this page cannot supply that. And if the novel is already on your shelf in print, note the sub-eight-hour runtime and make the edition question an email to the seller rather than a guess.
Key Details
- Voice: David Holt is the only reader named on the page, and since the listing cannot agree on which book it is selling, a sample is the only way to confirm what plays.
- Big ideas: faith under persecution, martyrdom and apostasy, seventeenth-century Japan
- Atmosphere: Grave and interrogative
- Worth it?: Worth your time if the Endo novel described here is what you came for, but settle the edition question with the seller first.
