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Book Summary and Reviews of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

by Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Published:
  • Sep 1990, 245 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"An intricate and dazzling novel." —The New York Times

"Brilliant and quietly devastating." —Newsweek

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

This information about The Remains of the Day was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Kazuo Ishiguro Author Biography

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on November, 8 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey.

Afterwards he worked as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating, worked as a residential social worker in London. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he met Angela Carter, who became an early mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication of his first novel, Ishiguro was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20...

... Full Biography
Author Interview

Name Pronunciation
Kazuo Ishiguro: KAH-zoo-oh ish-ih-GUHR-oh

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