Synopsis
ON MAY 28th, 1942, Sam Hawthorne, a twenty-five-year-old U.S. Army captain, arrives at the princely state of Rudrakot in search of his missing brother, Mike, carrying with him wounds from combat in Burma and several secrets. But Sam’s mission is soon threatened by the unlikeliest of sources—he falls hopelessly in love with Mila, daughter of the local political agent, Raman, at whose house he is staying.
Sam, part of a newly-formed OSS unit, comes to Rudrakot with a dislocated shoulder, an injury sustained when he had parachuted behind Japanese lines to escort out an American missionary, Marianne Westwood, who had not heeded the call to depart when the Japanese invaded Burma.
Sam searches for his brother, who is supposedly AWOL from a British regiment, but he says this to no one, not even his host, who finds him an engaging young man, and allows him to bunk in his home, but is nonetheless suspicious of his motives. Raman’s two sons, Kiran and Ashok, are at the cusp of their own troubles and upheavals. And Mila, unexpectedly attracted to Sam, nurtures a secret of her own and finds herself torn between loyalty to her family, a promise she has already given, and Sam.
And then, there’s Jai, the prince of Rudrakot, a tiny semi-independent kingdom under the hand and rule of the British government of India. He loves Mila also, with a fierce devotion that he has rarely shown to anyone else.
Set during only four days in May of 1942, The Splendor of Silence is a novel about how Sam’s arrival in Rudrakot begins a chain of events that changes the trajectories of the lives of all the characters—Mila, Raman, Ashok, Kiran, Jai…and even Sam himself, pulls them into different directions, leaves them as different people. And, all the while, in nine Burma scenes, the reader will follow Sam on his mission to rescue Marianne Westwood, along with the pilot of his plane—this recent past which injured him, informs and changes his present at Rudrakot.
The Splendor of Silence opens twenty-one years later with Olivia, Sam’s daughter, receiving a trunk of treasures from India, along with a letter from an unknown narrator that finally fills all the silences of her childhood—telling her the story of her parents’ passionate and enduring love for each other that throws them in the path of racial prejudice, nationalist intrigue, and the explosive circumstances of a country and a society on the brink of independence from British rule.
