What's a poor butler to do? Drive around England and think it all over in a series of hallucinatorily vivid flashbacks, that's what. Oh yeah, and his employer's increasingly creepy political views (short version: he's inviting Nazis to brunch) adds an additional wrinkle. Stevens's job description to forgo all personal attachments and commit himself completely to his job and his employer… and he super-enthusiastically embraces these rules until the arrival of a housekeeper arouses (tee hee) feelings he can barely acknowledge, even to himself.

We're in Downton Abbey territory here, a world with a rigid social hierarchy, with the wealthy gentlemen at the top and everyone else on the bottom. Stevens, the story offers up a behind-the-scenes look at important men of the day as they wrestle with important political issues in the years leading up to World War II.

Told from the perspective of the butler, Mr. But the novel, winner of the 1989 Man Booker Prize and famously adapted to the big screen in 1994, begins as a story about a butler on a cross-country drive… and turns into a book packed with emotional intensity, political intrigue and betrayal, and some insanely hard questions about regret and responsibility.

As far road as trips go, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Dayseems pretty tame: no drag racing, no drunken escapades, no wacky strangers, no one-night stands.

Remains of the day author