Books like A Pale View of Hills
A Japanese woman living in England recalls her life in postwar Nagasaki, and the gaps in her story conceal a truth she cannot bear to face.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Pale View of Hills
An Artist of the Floating World
In the years after World War II, a once-celebrated Japanese painter tries to arrange his daughter's marriage while slowly facing the propaganda he made for the imperial cause.
The Remains of the Day
An ageing English butler reflects on a lifetime of service, repressed love, and the moral compromises of loyalty to a flawed master.
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster, retired and settled, receives a solicitor's letter about a small bequest from the mother of his university girlfriend, and it forces him to revisit his friendship with Adrian, the brilliant schoolfriend whose story he thought he understood.
Peace
Alden Dennis Weer, an old man in a small Midwestern town, remembers his life, and his memories conceal horrors that only emerge on a second reading.
The Sound of the Mountain
An ageing patriarch in postwar Japan listens to the mountain and contemplates his family's slow dissolution, beauty, and the nearness of death.
Tokyo Ueno Station
The ghost of Kazu, a labourer from Fukushima who spent his last years among the homeless of Tokyo's Ueno Park, looks back on a life of work that began in the same year as the emperor's.
The Changeling
Kogito Choko, an ageing novelist, listens night after night to the tapes left by his brother-in-law, a famous film director who has jumped from a building, and tries to understand why.
The Lake
Gimpei Momoi, a former teacher who lost his job after an affair with a pupil, can't stop following women he sees in the street, and his memories drift back to a lake of his childhood.
Kokoro
A student in Meiji-era Tokyo befriends a withdrawn older man he calls Sensei, whose long final letter reveals the betrayal that hollowed out his life.
The Housekeeper and the Professor
A young housekeeper goes to work for a former mathematics professor whose memory, since an accident, lasts only eighty minutes; each morning she and her ten-year-old son are strangers to him again, and he greets them with numbers.
The General of the Dead Army
Twenty years after the Second World War, an Italian general and a priest travel the mountains of Albania to dig up and bring home the bones of their dead soldiers.
Austerlitz
A narrator meets Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, in the waiting room of Antwerp's railway station, and over chance meetings across thirty years hears him piece together a childhood he was cut off from.