The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day is a novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1989, narrated by Stevens, the longtime butler of Darlington Hall, an English country house, as he takes a rare motoring holiday across the West Country in 1956 to visit a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton. Over the course of the journey, Stevens's careful, formal recollections gradually reveal a more troubling history than the one he initially presents, chiefly his unwavering service to his former employer Lord Darlington, whose sympathetic dealings with Nazi Germany in the 1930s Stevens continued to defend and enable long after their moral cost became apparent, and his own suppressed feelings for Miss Kenton, whose growing affection for him he consistently failed to acknowledge or act on in the name of professional duty. Ishiguro builds the novel almost entirely through Stevens's restrained, self-justifying narration, so that the full extent of his misplaced loyalty and personal sacrifice emerges only through what the narration leaves out or minimizes rather than through direct statement. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989 and is widely regarded as one of the finest English novels of the postwar period; its 1993 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson received eight Academy Award nominations.