Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to Britain with his parents in 1960, when he was five. He studied on the University of East Anglia's creative writing course under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and his thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982). That book and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), set in an unnamed Japanese city during the Allied occupation after World War II, were noted for their mournful tone and their treatment of Japanese identity.

The Remains of the Day (1989) is narrated by Stevens, a butler at Darlington Hall near Oxford, who looks back on the 1920s and 1930s during a motoring trip in 1956. It won the Booker Prize, one of four times he has been shortlisted, and became a 1993 film. From there he moved into other genres while keeping first-person narrators in every novel except The Buried Giant (2015): Never Let Me Go (2005) has science fiction elements and was named Time's best novel of 2005, and Klara and the Sun (2021) is dystopian science fiction. The Swedish Academy's 2017 Nobel citation praised novels “of great emotional force.” He was knighted in 2018 and received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for Living (2022).

Start with The Remains of the Day. It is the clearest example of the method behind all his books: a narrator recounting his own past, where what matters most is what he leaves unsaid. It is also set in an England most readers can picture, which makes the restraint easy to follow.

Then read Never Let Me Go, which applies the same reminiscing voice to a speculative premise. Go in knowing as little as possible about that premise. After those two, choose by taste: An Artist of the Floating World for postwar Japan, Klara and the Sun for his most recent novel, or The Buried Giant for his one third-person book.