A Pale View of Hills

Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England, is visited by her younger daughter and thinks back to a summer in Nagasaki after the war. There she befriended Sachiko, a woman with a young daughter and an uncertain plan to leave Japan. Her memories are hazy and sometimes puzzling, and they are shadowed by the recent death of her elder daughter. Ishiguro's first novel is a quiet story of displacement, motherhood and the way memory can shield and distort.