What happens when science looks backward and belief looks nowhere at all?

Haunted by the violent death of his childhood friend and numbed by a world that no longer persuades him, Father David Callaghan leaves his parish in a quiet Irish town and travels to the Kalahari Desert. There, he joins an anthropological expedition studying a discovery among the San people—drawn by the hope that the origins of humanity might explain what his faith no longer can.

But in the desert, certainty begins to fracture.

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

Confronted with loss, doubt, and the limits of both reason and belief, he must face the question that brought him there: what remains of meaning when every system meant to contain it begins to fail?

The Cost of Knowing is a literary novel where anthropology collides with faith, and the search for truth becomes inseparable from what it demands.