The Remains of the Day (Everyman's Library, 349) - Hardcover

Ishiguro, Kazuo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307961443 ISBN 13: 9780307961440

Publisher: Everymans Library, 2012

Synopsis

From the Nobel Prize-winning author, here is an elegant Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the universally acclaimed novel--winner of the Booker Prize, a bestseller, and the basis for an award-winning film--with full-cloth binding, a silk ribbon marker, a chronology, and an introduction by Salman Rushdie.

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. 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.

About this title

Review:

The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second world war, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him--oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, beautifully crafted novel-- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.

Review:

"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

"A perfect novel. I couldn't put it down." --Ann Beattie

"The novel rests firmly on the narrative sophistication and flawless control of tone ... of a most impressive novelist." --Julian Barnes

About this edition

• Publisher: Everymans Library
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0307961443
• ISBN 13: 9780307961440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 213