Recommendations
Books Like The Remains of the Day
Best books to read after The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is the Booker Prize-winning novel of duty, regret, and the self-deception of a life devoted to the wrong things. These recommendations continue the Ishiguro canon, explore the British literary fiction tradition of unreliable narration and suppressed feeling, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about the enormous cost of not saying what we feel.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The essential companion Ishiguro — Kathy H. narrating the lives of herself and her friends at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school, revealing gradually that they are clones raised to donate their organs; shares The Remains of the Day's interest in a narrator who cannot face the full truth of their situation and the enormous cost of that avoidance.
- 2Buy
The Buried Giant
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The literary fantasy companion Ishiguro — Axl and Beatrice journeying through a post-Arthurian Britain shrouded in collective forgetting; shares The Remains of the Day's central question of whether it is better to remember the truth or live peacefully in suppression.
- 3Buy
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The most recent major Ishiguro novel — Klara, an Artificial Friend (a humanoid robot), narrating her observations of the human world from a solar-powered perspective; the companion Ishiguro for readers who want to see his characteristic themes of observation, self-deception, and unreliable narration in a near-future setting.
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Atonement
by Ian McEwan
The British literary fiction companion in the tradition of regret and retrospective self-justification — Briony Tallis narrating what she did to her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, and spending a lifetime trying to atone for it; shares The Remains of the Day's interest in a narrator who has suppressed something true about the past.
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A Month in the Country
by J.L. Carr
The British literary companion in the tradition of quiet retrospective regret — a shell-shocked WWI veteran spending a summer in a Yorkshire village restoring a medieval painting, looking back on a summer that was the best of his life; the novella most often cited as a companion to The Remains of the Day in the tradition of English melancholy and the might-have-been.
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Howard's End
by E.M. Forster
The English social class and duty companion — the Schlegel and Wilcox families and the question of who inherits England; shares The Remains of the Day's interest in English class, the tension between the practical and the intellectual life, and what duty to an institution or family costs a person.
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
The American companion in the tradition of a retrospective letter about a life — John Ames writing to his young son about everything he wants to pass on before he dies; shares The Remains of the Day's structure of an elderly narrator taking account of a life lived, and its interest in what dignity and grace look like in the face of ending.
- 8Buy
Stoner
by John Williams
The American companion in the tradition of the quiet life that is also a tragedy — William Stoner's academic life at the University of Missouri, a novel about a man who fails to fight for the things that matter to him; shares The Remains of the Day's interest in the cost of self-abnegation and the dignity that can still be found in a life of suppressed feeling.
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