The Remains of the Day

By: Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by: Dominic West

Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning masterpiece became an international bestseller on publication, was adapted into an award-winning film and has since come to be regarded as a modern classic.

The Remains of the Day is a spellbinding portrayal of a vanished way of life and a haunting meditation on the high cost of duty. It is also one of the most subtle, sad and humorous love stories ever written. It is the summer of 1956, when Stevens, a man who has dedicated himself to his career as a perfect butler in the one-time great house of Darlington Hall, sets off on a holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and, unexpectedly, into his own past, especially his friendship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. As memories surface of his lifetime "in service" to Lord Darlington, and of his life between the wars, when the fate of the continent seemed to lie in the hands of a few men, he finds himself confronting the dark undercurrent beneath the carefully run world of his employer.

Critic reviews

“A dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Marvellous. . . . Superb.” —The Globe and Mail

“This is a work that goes to the heart of a lost life. Beautifully composed, totally unsentimental, immeasurably tender.” —The Observer

“A virtuoso performance . . . put on with dazzling daring and aplomb.” —The New York Review of Books

“As strong as it is delicate, a very finely nuanced and at times humorous study of repression.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“By any definition, The Remains of the Day is a great book. . . . Ishiguro is a master.” —Ottawa Citizen

“A triumph. . . . Ishiguro’s creative control . . . never falters. This wholly convincing portrait of a human life unweaving before your eyes is inventive and absorbing, and by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.” —The Sunday Times

“Brilliant and quietly devastating.” —Newsweek

“One of the best books of the decade.” —The Boston Globe

“Suspenseful, intriguing, elegiac and politically astute. . . . Both subtle and humane. . . . Simply read it for pleasure, and be richly rewarded.” —The Guardian

“An ineffably sad and beautiful piece of work—a tragedy in the form of a comedy of manners.” —Chicago Tribune

“Ishiguro writes a flowing, curiously timeless and placeless English. . . . The quietude is seductive, and matches the kindness of this book.” —Vogue

“Full of music from a past that, through nuance and innuendo, is slenderly poisoned, turning wit and perfectly timed farce into a political ghost story. . . . Ishiguro has become one of the finest prose stylists of our time.” —Michael Ondaatje

“A diamond of a book, perfectly cut, with splendid and uncountable facets, deceptively modest.” —John le Carré

“A remarkable, strange and moving book.” —Sebastian Faulks, The Independent

“There is nobody writing in Britain today who quite resembles [Ishiguro]. In a fictional landscape babbling with psychodrama and magical realism, this restrained and sensitive voice falls like a balm.” —Colin Thubron, The Sunday Times

“The novel rests firmly on the narrative sophistication and flawless control of tone ... of a most impressive novelist.” —Julian Barnes, The Literary Review

A little posh, at first

It might seem as though the story is solely about trivial manners of servitude to an employer, and this might frustrate or offend an average reader. However, give it time to develop, and you will find that the narrator is, while truthful, unreliable in some ways. His life lesson and change is the focus of this story, and it’s moral can apply to a person of any wealth or profession. A pleasant read, overall, with an outstanding audiobook performance.