The Remains of the Day

In the summer of 1956 an ageing butler borrows his new employer's Ford and drives west out of Oxfordshire across the English West Country, ostensibly to inspect the roads and secretly to call on a housekeeper he once worked beside. The map follows that six-day trip: a first night by Salisbury Cathedral, on through the Somerset and Devon country to the far coast, and back to a pier at Weymouth where the accounting of a wasted life finally arrives.

Stevens

Darlington Hall, Oxfordshire

Prologue

The great house where Stevens has served for decades, first under a disgraced English lord and now an American owner. When the new master suggests he take the car and see something of the country, the butler sets off west, and the whole book is told as he drives and remembers. The hall is fictional; the novel roots it in Oxfordshire, the starting point of the journey.

Prologue, July 1956

inspired by Darlington Hall is invented, a stately home the novel places in rural Oxfordshire; commentators treat it as a conflation of English country houses rather than a single real building. Sited at a representative point in the Oxfordshire countryside west of Oxford, outside the West Country setting the trip crosses into.

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