The Remains of the Day is a novel about repression in the specific British institutional sense — the butler Stevens who has organized his entire self around the concept of dignity in service, who looks back on a life of professional excellence and cannot quite say whether it cost him everything that mattered.

Ishiguro withholds in a particular way. He gives you, through Stevens' own narration, all the evidence you need to see what Stevens cannot see about himself. The gap between what Stevens tells you and what Stevens is telling you is where the novel lives.

I have recommended it to people in certain jobs — people whose professional identity is so strong it has replaced their personal one — and they always come back to me with a strange look. The book knows something they've been trying not to know.