Silence, by Shusaku Endo (Peter Owen, £12.50 in UK)

Shusaku is now in his seventies and is one of the Grander, Older Men of Japanese writing. The theme of this rather bleak, 20 year old novel is a strange one: the 17th century Christians in Japan, the missionaries who converted them or ministered to them, and the persecutions under the Shoguns, who feared Christianity as an alien element which endangered their rule and the State. The main character is a priest who has apostasised through fear, betraying his faith and his parishioners, and who afterwards is bullied emotionally by a sadistic magistrate. The end is anticlimactic, but it is clear that Western style Christianity has foundered in the "swamp of Japan."