The Silence of God

By: Paul Böer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What does a man do with suffering that cannot be cured, cannot be argued away, and will not explain itself?

Bill Thornton is sixty-seven years old, dying of Stage IV pancreatic cancer in Room 412 of Greenfield Regional Oncology Ward, and he is running out of things to count. He lost his company in seventy-two hours. He lost his wife and two daughters in the space of three weeks. His son did not come. His Franciscan spiritual director, Father Jerome Smith, has been sleeping in the vinyl chair beside his bed for twenty days.

What happens in that room is not a comfort story.

The Silence of God follows a dying man and a priest through twenty days in which Bill Thornton strips everything down to the last thing: the one act of will a man can make when he has nothing left to make it with. The novel draws on Gregory the Great's sixth-century commentary on the Book of Job and John Paul II's Salvifici Doloris, though it argues nothing. It moves the way suffering moves: slowly, without adequate announcement, and without the resolution readers are trained to expect.

For readers of Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and Marilynne Robinson.

Book One of The Where Were You Trilogy. The story continues in The Judas Path.