The Remains of the Day

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi (last blank)], 245. Black cloth boards, lettered in white to spine.

Flawless copy.

His third book and first with an English setting. 1989 Booker Prize Award Winner, with David Lodge, the chairman of the judges remarking it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance".

"After all what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?" The high price paid by a 'perfect' English butler in interwar England, who places duty above his own feelings. An exploration of emotional repression and deference to authority through a profession constituting the apogée of self-effacement and abnegation.

The central character, Stevens, was partly inspired by Tom Waits' emotional rendition of his song "Ruby's Arms": "Waits sings [it] with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness. I heard this and reversed a decision I'd made, that Stevens would remain emotionally buttoned up right to the bitter end. I decided that at just one point... his rigid defence would crack, and a hitherto concealed tragic romanticism would be glimpsed."

The source for the 1993 Merchant/Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Christopher Reeve which was nominated for eight Academy Awards. In 2008, The Times named Ishiguro among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945," while in 2017 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. "An intricate and dazzling novel." –The New York Times

[Shaffer, Brian W. Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2005; The Guardian Book Club, 6 December 2014]