Recommendations
Books Like The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro fiction, British novels of regret and repression, and books about lives lived in service to the wrong things
If The Remains of the Day quietly devastated you with Stevens's inability to acknowledge what he has lost, these eight works share its aesthetics of repression, its retrospective narration that reveals more than its narrator intends, and its account of lives organized around ideals that turn out to be inadequate.
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Buy on AmazonNever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian masterpiece — clones raised for organ donation, told in retrospect by Kathy H. with the same aesthetics of repression as The Remains of the Day; perhaps the most devastating ending in contemporary fiction.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
Ford's 1915 novel of an unreliable retrospective narrator who gradually reveals what he has suppressed — the predecessor to Stevens's self-deceiving retrospection; Dowell is the Stevens of Edwardian England.
- 3
Buy on AmazonBrideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's 1945 novel of nostalgia and the English Catholic aristocracy — another retrospective narration of a lost world, another narrator who organizes his life around an institution (Brideshead, Darlington Hall) that fails him.
- 4
Buy on AmazonMrs Bridge
by Evan S. Connell
Connell's 1959 novel of a Kansas City housewife in the 1930s and 1940s who has suppressed herself so thoroughly she can barely be found — the American Stevens; a life of quiet self-erasure told in a series of numbered vignettes.
- 5
Buy on AmazonAn Artist of the Floating World
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's 1986 second novel — a Japanese painter who realizes in retrospect that his art served Japanese nationalism; the Japanese parallel to Stevens's English complicity in Lord Darlington's pro-Nazi activities.
- 6
Buy on AmazonOn Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
McEwan's 2007 novella of a failed wedding night and the life it forecloses — the same precision about the cost of English emotional repression; what happens when two people can't say what they need to say.
- 7
Buy on AmazonHousekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's 1980 novel of two girls raised by a drifter aunt in Idaho — the same sense of lives organized around an inadequate ideal, told in prose of rare lyrical beauty.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Buried Giant
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's 2015 Arthurian novel — an elderly couple in post-Arthurian Britain who can no longer remember their past; the same themes of memory, repression, and what we choose not to acknowledge, in a fantasy setting.
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