The Cost of Knowing

What happens when science looks backward—and belief finds nothing at all?

Some questions begin in curiosity. Then they don’t.

Haunted by the violent death of his childhood friend and increasingly disillusioned with humanity, Father David Callaghan can no longer reconcile his vocation with his growing skepticism. He leaves his parish in a quiet Irish town and travels to the Kalahari Desert, drawn by a discovery linking the San people to some of humanity’s oldest known lineages—hoping that by looking backward, he might understand where the human story went wrong.

But in the desert, certainty fractures.

As tensions within the expedition deepen—driven by ambition, desire, and irreconcilable worldviews—a murder and a disappearance unravel its fragile order. Stranded in the wilderness with a young anthropologist and a San boy, David is forced into a struggle for survival no discipline can explain.

What follows is not a search for answers, but a confrontation with their absence.

Faced with loss, doubt, and the collapse of both reason and belief, David must confront the question that brought him there: what remains of meaning when the story we tell about ourselves no longer holds?

The Cost of Knowing is a literary novel where anthropology collides with faith—and where the pursuit of truth becomes inseparable from what it demands: a reckoning with the cost of consciousness itself.