"Kazuo Ishiguro"

1989 · Kazuo Ishiguro · 258 pages · Literary Fiction

The Remains of the Day is the kind of novel that seems modest in ambition until it isn't. Stevens, the butler-narrator, is one of the great self-deceiving characters in English fiction, and watching him fail to see what you can see clearly is both painful and profound. This is a short book that reads large, a story about one man's life that somehow becomes a story about everyone who has ever chosen duty over feeling and wondered, too late, whether they chose correctly.

2005 · Kazuo Ishiguro · 263 pages · Literary Fiction

Never Let Me Go is a novel that works on you slowly, like a bruise you don't notice until you press against it. Ishiguro uses a quiet, deceptively plain surface to deliver something devastating underneath. It's not a book that offers catharsis or resolution, and that's precisely the point. Readers who engage with it on its own terms tend to find it unforgettable. Those expecting conventional narrative payoffs will be frustrated. Either way, it stays with you.