The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is narrated by Stevens, a butler with a long record of service at Darlington Hall, a stately home near Oxford. It is 1956, and the Hall's original owner, Lord Darlington, has died; the house has been bought by a wealthy American, Mr Farraday, who has kept Stevens on with much of the staff gone. Stevens worries that he can no longer maintain the standards he holds himself to, and when he receives a letter from a former colleague, the ex-housekeeper Mrs Benn, once Miss Kenton, he reads in it hints that she has left her husband and might want to return to her old post.

Farraday encourages Stevens to take a motoring holiday, and the drive into the West Country becomes the occasion for going back over the years between the wars at Darlington Hall: the guests who came to the house, the private discussions his employer hosted, the standards of service Stevens set for himself and his staff, and Miss Kenton, whose time at the Hall ended with her departure. The novel is Stevens's own account of those years, delivered in his own idiom as he travels.

The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 and won the Booker Prize for Fiction that year. It was adapted into a film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and in 2022 it was included on the Big Jubilee Read list of seventy books by Commonwealth authors.