The Remains of the Day

A masterpiece of understatement and emotional restraint that reveals profound truths about duty, dignity, and lost opportunities for love.

Stevens, the perfect English butler, has devoted his life to serving Lord Darlington at his grand estate. Now in 1956, with his master dead and the estate sold to an American, Stevens embarks on a motoring trip through the English countryside, ostensibly to visit Mrs. Kenton, the former housekeeper who left Darlington Hall years ago.

As Stevens travels through the changing English landscape, his thoughts return obsessively to the past—to the great days when Darlington Hall hosted important political figures, to his relationship with his father (also a butler), and most painfully, to his complex feelings for Miss Kenton. Through Stevens's narration, Ishiguro gradually reveals a man who has sacrificed everything—love, family, personal happiness—in service of an ideal of professional dignity that may have been misplaced from the beginning.

The novel's devastating power lies in what Stevens cannot or will not acknowledge directly. His employer Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer who used his position to influence British policy in Hitler's favor, yet Stevens remains loyal to his memory. More heartbreakingly, Stevens recalls his interactions with Miss Kenton with the emotional detachment of a professional report, unable to admit even to himself that he loved her and that she loved him.

Ishiguro's prose perfectly captures Stevens's voice—formal, precise, and increasingly desperate as his carefully constructed worldview begins to crumble. Winner of the Booker Prize, this novel establishes Ishiguro as one of literature's most subtle and powerful voices.