The Remains of the Day

Stevens, long-time butler of Darlington Hall, takes a motoring holiday through the West Country while his new American employer is away. The journey prompts a review of the 1920s and 1930s, when Lord Darlington used the house for private meetings with German sympathizers and when Stevens managed the staff beside the housekeeper Miss Kenton. He measures dignity as perfect service and refuses to judge his employer's politics or to answer Kenton's hints of another life. Inns, country roads, and the great house form the setting. The novel is a first-person study of self-deception and domestic service, not a political history of appeasement.

Bound in light-brown cloth blocked in dark brown and gilt with a wrap-around picture. Brown slipcase and endpapers.