The remains of the day

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL (/kæˈzuːoʊ ˌɪʃɪˈɡʊəroʊ, ˈkæzuoʊ -/ kaz-OO-oh ISH-ig-OOR-oh, KAZ-oo-oh -⁠; born 8 November 1954) is an English novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was five.

He is one of the most critically-acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in …