A Pale View of Hills

I got this for my birthday (35 last week!) and finished it in the wee small hours last night. I love Ishiguro's work. His central idea is that his narrators lie - through their teeth - and do such a good job of it that it is easy to read a story and wonder where the story is. This creepy and compelling book concerns a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England who is ostensibly recovering from the suicide of her daughter. Her memories take her back to the hot summer of 1946 when Japan was recovering from the fallout of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. All the trauma, shell-shock and horror is subsumed into an icy narrative where lies, self-delusion and even hallucination draw a veil over confusing and terrible events. Ishiguro is a brave and original writer and I adored this book.