Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Remains of the Day
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 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.
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.
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.
The Go-Between
An old man in 1952 revisits the summer of 1900 when, as a 12-year-old houseguest, he carried secret messages between a Norfolk farmer and the daughter of the big house.
The Post-Office Girl
A poor Austrian post-office clerk is briefly swept into a luxury Swiss resort by a rich aunt and returns to her village unable to bear the life she had.
The Good Soldier
A naive American narrator tries to tell the 'saddest story' of his friendship with Edward Ashburnham and the four-way adultery he failed to notice until it had ended them all.
Brooklyn
In the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey leaves her mother and sister in a small Irish town for a job in Brooklyn, where homesickness slowly gives way to a new life and a love affair, until news from home calls her back.
Taipei People
Stories of mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1949, generals, courtesans and servants, living on memories of the lives they lost.
Olive Kitteridge
Thirteen linked stories circle Olive Kitteridge, a fierce, difficult maths teacher in coastal Maine, whose small cruelties and unexpected tenderness touch a whole town.
The Optimist's Daughter
A woman returns to Mississippi after her father's death and has to contend with his young second wife and her own memories of home.
Hotel du Lac
Edith Hope, a writer of romance novels, is packed off by her friends to a quiet Swiss hotel out of season after an unforgivable lapse, and passes the time watching the other guests.