Saumya Roy is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Waste Pickers of Mumbai, a narrative non-fiction book about the garbage landfill of Mumbai. It is among NPR, Washington Independent Review, Telegraph India, GQ India, and theprint.in's best loved books for 2021.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that "trace the unlikely journey of love bucking against constrictions within and without—making us all worthy of romantic love," including:
The Remains of The Day by Kazuo IshiguroRead about the other entries on the list.
A love so unlikely it may not have existed at all and yet so undying that the main character sets out to find it, and himself, decades later. Working as a butler, Mr.Stevens dutifully spent years holding up the vestiges of a mansion and with it, Britain’s declining post-war power and nobility. Miss Kanton, the housekeeper, waited for Mr. Stevens to tire of his efforts of keeping up with this slipping world and to turn to building a life of his own with her. Was the unarticulated and unexamined self even there? Years later, Stevens leaves on a road trip, in a rapidly transforming Britain, to reclaim himself and a love that had stayed unspoken and nearly unfelt.
The Remains of the Day is among A. Natasha Joukovsky's seven novels that subvert social norms, Mark Skinner's ten best country house novels, Xan Brooks's ten top terrible houses in fiction, Molly Schoemann-McCann's nine great books for people who love Downton Abbey, Lucy Lethbridge's ten top books about servants, and Tim Vine's six best books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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