In Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel, an artist returning to her home city is consumed by images of the lavish cruelties she endured there as a child
The Booker Prize 1989
Kazuo Ishiguro won with Remains of the Day but only after a row in which two female judges excluded Martin Amis’s London Fields from the running for its unfeminist anti-heroine.
While the three male judges were keen on Amis’s novel, both Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil thought the depiction of Nicola Six was misogynistic and Gee threatened resignation if it made the shortlist. The women won the day.
The fuss, however, failed to overshadow the merits of Ishiguro’s novel – stylish, nuanced, with a memorably unreliable narrator in the butler Stevens – which was later turned into an Oscar-nominated film scripted by another Booker Prize winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
The Remains of the Day
Winner of The Booker Prize 1989
- Published by
- Faber & Faber
Kazuo Ishiguro’s moving portrait of the perfect English butler, his loyalty and his fading, insular world in post-war England
The shortlist
John Banville’s novel is the compelling confession of an unlikely killer. To what extent is this darkly poetic admission of guilt actually ‘true’?
Sybille Bedford’s evocative semi-autobiographical novel walks the fine line between memory and fiction as it recreates a lost time and place
Kazuo Ishiguro’s moving portrait of the perfect English butler, his loyalty and his fading, insular world in post-war England
James Kelman’s brilliant and complex character study tells the story of one week in a man's life, in which he decides to change the way he lives
By James Kelman
In Rose Tremain’s wry historical novel, a student abandons his studies to revel in gluttony, indolence and buffoonery at the Court of King Charles II
By Rose Tremain
