Souls of Silence narrates the story of a romantic relationship between Pablo Velázquez, a Spanish professional football player, young, rich, famous, relishing the glory of a turbulent athletic career in his early twenties, and Andrey “Andrew” Gordovsky, a Russian doctor, seven years older, struggling with poverty and deprived of self-actualization prospects in the corrupt realities of his industry in his country, and married to a woman. Both protagonists are closeted gay men who had never acknowledged their homosexuality to themselves, one because of rampant homophobia in his athletic community, and the other because of rampant homophobia in his country as a whole. Living their lives in the straitjackets of heteronormativity, they are unsurprisingly unhappy in their dysfunctional relationships with women before they meet each other. In what seems a chance encounter on one of Barcelona beaches, they both find themselves at the point of deep vulnerability in their life journeys, although their stories prior to that point are so different. Their emotional connection quickly grows beyond the limits of friendship. They don’t discover the real nature of their feelings for each other at the same time, but when they do, the hardest and most transformative struggle of their lives begins. Separated by two thousand miles, despite the absence of physical intimacy, with time they learn the meaning of true love from each other. As their love grows stronger, their short, secret reunions for a few days in a year do not change the fact that their lives are separated by an abyss of social class and cultural differences. Their hearts belong together, but the people they think they are supposed to be do not fit together. The striking differences between their realities and the controversies of Pablo’s celebrity life put a veto on their relationship as Andrew’s career in Russia deteriorates further and his marriage falls apart. Working through his internalized homophobic shame and triumphing over it, he realizes that Pablo is the love of his life and his most important reason to move to Spain and start from scratch, although other reasons are also present. He puts together the small savings he had made from many previous years of hard work in his underfunded industry in order to emigrate and get an educational course required to get employed as a doctor in Spain. He musters up the resolve to leave his four-year-old daughter whom he loves deeply in Russia, although he is reasonably worried if his wife can be a good mother to her. When learning about his intention, Pablo is scared and discourages Andrew into staying in Russia, despite Andrew’s solid professional motives for emigration. He sees Andrew’s presence in Barcelona and the possibility of their relationship being revealed as the biggest threat to his public image and his career. His fear and internalized homophobia force him to distance himself from Andrew in their correspondence despite his growing feelings. Less than a year later, Pablo announces to Andrew that he is going to marry Monica, a fashion model he had recently met in Italy. Andrew understands that it is a lavender marriage that Pablo rushes into because of his anxiety over the rumors circulating about his sexual orientation in the Spanish media and his club’s management, while Pablo refuses to acknowledge it. Shortly after Pablo’s engagement, Andrew comes to Barcelona on his invitation under the occasion of meeting Pablo’s fiancée. Both Andrew and Pablo’s parents, unaware of their son’s sexuality and believing Andrew to be just another friend, recognize Monica’s mercenary motives in marrying him, but Pablo steamrolls with his marriage plans regardless, overcome with narcissism, need for publicity, and unacknowledged homophobic shame. At the same place where he once made the first step and professed his love for Andrew, he now mocks him for hoping for a relationship and for believing that he deserved a better future in Spain. Andrew is decimated. He rushes to leave Barcelona as soon as he can. After he comes to Moscow, he feels abandoned and betrayed by everything and everyone he’s ever loved, and, for a strange reason he cannot make sense of, even the presence of his daughter cannot remedy the overwhelming grief he is feeling. Over the next months, he falls into paralyzing clinical depression and hits rock bottom as he relives the story of his and Pablo’s relationship and his childhood traumas on the background of his worsening employment situation. Despite the ravages of his mental suffering, the love for Pablo and the belief in his goodness persevere in his heart. Six months later, Pablo’s mother calls to tell him that her son’s wife played a scheme behind his back cooperating with his club management member, which was aimed to defame Pablo as a dope user before a major match and thus ban him from professional sports for years. In the kind of desperation that his parents witness for the first time in his life, Pablo drives away from the city and is now missing for two days. Now, Pablo's mother asks Andrew whether Pablo contacted him, and Andrew says he hasn’t heard from Pablo since their last fight. He catches a last-minute flight to Barcelona, only to find the next day what sounds like a suicide note from his loved one. Crisscrossing adjacent countryside during two days, he finds Pablo in a roadside hotel in the midst of an overdose attempt and saves him. Surviving what happened, Pablo is now ready to reckon with the truth. There’s no more point in denying who they are to each other. He tells Andrew that he is ready to come out and, if necessary, quit his professional sports career. He looks forward to their future together in Spain and Andrew’s better future as part of it. But Andrew no longer believes in his own worthiness. He no longer believes in the possibility of his better future, whether with Pablo or not. His clinical depression has taken its toll on his perception of himself, and he believes that his role and Pablo’s life is accomplished and he has to leave. Right on cue, his mother-in-law calls from Moscow and breaks horrible news to him: his wife and daughter are severely injured in a traffic collision caused by his father-in-law driving under influence, so Andrew urgently flies back. As his daughter needs a blood transfusion, he becomes aware of her blood type and, with the knowledge of his, realizes that it is not compatible with his paternity of her. The memories of his wife multiple affairs come crashing upon him as he steals the girl’s blood sample from the hospital for a genetic test. He remembers that his daughter was the only anchor that had kept him from emigration for so many years before. He doesn’t share this with Pablo and his mental illness aggravates as he cannot summon up the courage to open the genetic test results. He comes back to work in the same university clinic where his career started years before. He again faces the very realities of Russian healthcare that once made him want to emigrate: ubiquitous corruption, underfunding, embezzlement schemes, instituionalized malpractice. He quickly gets overwhelmed feeling how much he doesn’t belong here, but his worsening depression feeds on his dark experiences and bullies him into settling for misery and believing that he deserves it. In the meantime, he witnesses the suicides of two young residents as a result of homophobic bullying they suffered for what was perceived as a relationship by their colleagues, and it drowns him in self-hatred further. Pablo’s attempts to regain his trust and encourage him to move to Spain no longer work through the mist of his insanity. He gives up on himself as delusional ideas about God’s rage and suicidal ideation start haunting him. In Barcelona, Pablo succeeds in resolving legal conflicts with the club management and continues his career, nevertheless understanding that his loved one is in mental disaster thousands of miles away, his guilt for what’s happening increasingly weighing him down. Finally, one day before what Andrew scheduled as his suicide, he opens the results of the genetic test confirming that he isn’t the father of the girl he has been raising as his daughter for five years. Strangely, he doesn’t feel pain. The next morning, he suddenly feels that the symptoms of his terminal depression recede. He waits for another day to make sure that the illness he already believed to be incurable is getting better, and to his great surprise, it does. He starts making legal preparations for definitively moving to Spain and finally making his dreams happen and emails Pablo to tell that he is coming in one week. At this point, one might expect a gorgeous finale of two handsome lovers consummating their love under the Mediterranean sun and living happily ever after. Alas, as Pablo doesn’t respond to his emails and take his phone calls over two days, Andrew gets increasingly nervous and finally calls Pablo’s parents. He learns that after a sudden heart attack in a coaching session, Pablo was brought to a hospital and now is diagnosed with dilative cardiomyopathy, a fatal cardiac disease for which there is no cure except a heart transplant. Andrew moves to Barcelona and realizing Pablo’s grim prognosis decides to use his lifetime savings to make one of Pablo’s dreams come true. Without Pablo being aware, he collects Pablo’s semen during the first and, as it turns out, only sex that they have ever had, and substitutes it for his own material in a surrogacy program he confidentially applies for at a private fertility clinic in Barcelona. Despite the implantation of a pacemaker and other supportive treatments, Pablo’s condition aggravates rapidly and no compatible heart donor can be found because of his rare blood type. In five months after being diagnosed, Pablo starts needing in-hospital care on a daily basis and opts to stay there rather than allow his parents and Andrew to watch him wither at home. Andrew is devastated as he can’t move on with his own life and career, but Pablo encourages him to do it for the sake of the future he has deserved for so long. The footballer’s diseased heart stops beating on the day when his baby girl is born. This is how the novel ends. Three years later in the epilogue, Andrew is shown making a successful career at a major hospital in Barcelona. He is raising Pablo's daughter together with Pablo's parents, who remain oblivious to the nature of their relationship but who have effectively become his family. Grateful for the little infinity of their love, he guards it in his heart and is hopeful to meet Pablo one day in the afterlife.