--- product_id: 8649498 title: "A Pale View of Hills" price: "₹ 3013" currency: INR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.in/products/8649498-a-pale-view-of-hills store_origin: IN region: India --- # A Pale View of Hills **Price:** ₹ 3013 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** A Pale View of Hills - **How much does it cost?** ₹ 3013 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.in](https://www.desertcart.in/products/8649498-a-pale-view-of-hills) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day Here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II. Review: A highly rated book that teaches us lots about human beings - Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Kazuo Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan, nine years after the city was devastated by the atomic bomb that ended World War II. In 1960, when he was five years old, his family moved to Guildford, Surrey, England, after his father, an oceanographer, accepted a research position there. Although Ishiguro grew up in Britain and became a British citizen in 1982, his Japanese heritage profoundly nurtured and shaped his imagination and early fiction. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent. He later earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where he studied under renowned novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He worked with homeless people before becoming a full-time novelist. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), established him as a significant literary voice immediately. He followed his initial success with a series of more acclaimed novels exploring memory, identity, loss, dignity, and the uncertainty of human recollection. His novel The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and brought him worldwide fame. Other celebrated works include Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and Klara and the Sun. In 2017, Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised him “...who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." Today he is regarded as one of the world's greatest living novelists. His novels in chronological order are A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015), Klara and the Sun (2021), and The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain (2025). Other major publications include The Gourmet (1987, television screenplay), The Saddest Music in the World (2003, screenplay), The White Countess (2005, screenplay), and Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009, short-story collection). Although several of his novels are classics, The Remains of the Day is generally considered Ishiguro's masterpiece and his most famous novel because it won the Booker Prize, has sold millions of copies, was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and appears regularly on lists of the greatest English-language novels. Never Let Me Go is probably his second most widely read novel, particularly among younger readers. Ishiguro's writing is distinctive for several reasons. Rather than dramatic confrontations, emotional revelations emerge gradually through restrained conversation and subtle observations—often through unreliable memory. Narrators with unreliable memory sincerely recount events, yet readers slowly realize that these and other memories are incomplete, selective, or distorted. Characters rarely express strong feelings openly. Much of the emotion lies beneath the surface. Important events are hinted at rather than fully described, requiring readers to infer meaning. The central conflicts occur within characters' minds rather than through external action. His sentences are generally clear and elegant, yet they explore complex ideas about regret, guilt, dignity, mortality, and identity. A Pale View of Hills is "elliptical" and an "elegy." In literature, elliptical means that the author deliberately leaves important information unstated. Readers must infer motivations, relationships, and even crucial events. A Pale View of Hills is elliptical because many conversations avoid saying what people truly feel; traumatic events are suggested rather than explained; the narrator may conceal painful truths; the relationship between Sachiko and Mariko mirrors aspects of Etsuko's own life without the novel explicitly confirming every parallel. Readers gradually piece together the deeper story from hints rather than direct statements. This style causes readers to think, and it pleases most readers. An elegy is a literary work expressing mourning, remembrance, or sorrow for what has been lost. A Pale View of Hills is an elegy because it mourns lives destroyed by World War II, postwar Nagasaki, broken families, lost innocence, vanished traditions, and, above all, Etsuko's daughter Keiko, whose suicide casts a shadow over the entire novel. The novel is less about the events themselves than about living with grief decades later. The principal characters in the novel are Etsuko – the narrator, now living in England, recalling her youth in Nagasaki after World War II. Keiko – Etsuko's older daughter, who dies by suicide before the novel begins. Niki – Etsuko's younger daughter, independent and modern, who visits her mother in England. Sachiko – Etsuko's friend in Nagasaki, dreaming of leaving Japan for America. Mariko – Sachiko's lonely and emotionally troubled daughter. Frank – an American soldier with whom Sachiko hopes to build a new life. Jiro – Etsuko's first husband. Ogata-san – Jiro's father, representing traditional Japanese values. A Pale View of Hills is a remarkably accomplished debut that announces many of the themes Kazuo Ishiguro would develop throughout his career. Readers, like me, will not only enjoy this first Ishiguro book, but will buy more to enjoy his other writings. The novel moves quietly between present-day England and postwar Nagasaki as Etsuko reflects on her past following the death of her eldest daughter. Rather than relying on dramatic plot twists, Ishiguro builds emotional power through memory, suggestion, and silence. The relationship between Etsuko, Sachiko, and their daughters becomes increasingly haunting, inviting readers to question whether memory, even in their own lives, can ever be fully trusted. Ishiguro’s restrained prose, combined with the novel’s lingering presence of grief, creates an atmosphere that is intimate and sometimes unsettling, but not off-putting. The novel is fascinating and raises interesting questions about guilt, identity, motherhood, and the ways people reshape painful memories to continue living. It is a subtle, moving work that rewards careful reading and often reveals new meanings upon a second reading. Readers can draw many enduring lessons from A Pale View of Hills, such as: Memory is imperfect. People often remember the past in imperfect ways that protect them from unbearable pain. Unresolved grief endures. Emotional wounds may remain long after outward recovery. Parents' choices, like all human acts, have consequences and will shape children's lives. Even decisions made with good intentions can have unforeseen consequences. Trauma affects generations. The scars of war and family loss can influence children and grandchildren. The novel also shows that cultures change rapidly after upheaval. The novel explores tensions between long-held traditions and modernization in postwar Japan. Silence has consequences. Avoiding difficult conversations may deepen misunderstanding and isolation. Compassion matters. Many characters are lonely or emotionally isolated, reminding readers of the importance of empathy. Literature can reveal truth indirectly. Ishiguro demonstrates that suggestion, ambiguity, and restraint can sometimes express emotional realities more powerfully than explicit explanation. Truth is revealed in many ways if one pays attention. Readers will find that A Pale View of Hills is a meditation on how people live with memory and loss. Rather than offering easy answers, it invites readers to reflect on the complexity of human relationships, the burdens of the past, and the quiet resilience - the process and capacity of successfully adapting to challenging life experiences - required to move forward toward future rewards. Review: A Debut with a Compelling, Spooky Story - It is impossible not to finish *Pale View of the Hills* with a sense of bewilderment. The ending is very enigmatic and inconclusive, which some readers have judged as a sign of inexperience of a first novel. Although quite surprising, it does feel like a M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth-Sense plot twist--something explicitly and almost artificially placed at the end of the story to thrill audiences as it brings a totally new light (or haze, if you will), almost a cliché that Ishiguro wisely decided not use in other novels (but Shyamalan unwisely just can't give up.) So, yes, there is something loose in the structure of PVH that feels inexperienced, but still, the whole novel is far from an unpleasant journey, because it already brings many of the qualities of Ishiguro's later novels. And this one is quite spooky. Japan is famous for its 'obake' ghost stories, tales about creepy ghosts of women with long, black hair (think of *The Ring*). It is interesting to research on the term right now and learn from Wiki that, literally, 'obake' means *a thing that changes*, referring to a state of transformation or shape-shifting. I guess Ishiguro didn't have this idea in mind when he wrote *PVH*. There is no explicitly supernatural element in the story and, structurally, what runs underneath the main plot of the characters is much more a detective story about a sequence of Bolaño-like misterious crimes than anything else. However, and I can't explain exactly why, this novel felt to me as creepy as one of those obake stories because of some rather disturbing scenes and details, and the fact that things change so much at the end makes it quite consistent with the concept of 'obake', in a contemporary format. Nagasaki also comes to the story with this purpose, as I read it. Of course it was quite natural that Ishiguro would choose a familiar environment of his ancestry as subject of his first novel, but being a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb and then fully reconstructed, Nagasaki seemed to me charged with a lot of symbolic value--particularly when put into the context of lives that were also, in different perspectives, destroyed and wrecked, and then rebuilt in a way to hide all scars as if nothing ever happened. That is why the image of the Nagasaki harbor, seen from the top of the Inasa Mountain in the beginning of Part 2, was a very strong image to me. Inasa's is also the pale view of the hills that Etsuko saw from the window of her apartment in Nagasaki, making constant change of perspective a central symbol of the book. Well into the novel, Etsuko the narrator, says: "Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here." Ishiguro is famous for his unreliable narrators and his ability to hide and surgically reveal to his reader what he is really talking about (something he does extremely well in *Never Let Me Go*) and in *PVH* I could sense the first, still somewhat reluctant steps of his in that direction. The fact that people in Japan are known for their reticence, always not externally declaring/revealing what they are really feeling (out of a mix of introspection, decorum and a strict social code) is also very instrumental for Ishiguro to build his dualities and subtleties in this novels, something (I guess) he would then transcribe to the formalities of the English society in the 1930s in *The Remains of the Day*. I began ranking *PHV* with a 3-star to distinguish it from *Never Let Me Go*, imho, still one of his best books, but as all elements and nuances of the story settled in my mind I noticed how I liked it and how it was appealing, however spooky, and still leaving interesting ideas to think about. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #49,555 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #101 in Asian American & Pacific Islander Literature (Books) #779 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction #2,316 in Family Life Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.1 out of 5 stars 3,017 Reviews | ## Images ![A Pale View of Hills - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71-epgMEu3L.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Media Language, Media Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A highly rated book that teaches us lots about human beings *by I***N on July 24, 2026* Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Kazuo Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan, nine years after the city was devastated by the atomic bomb that ended World War II. In 1960, when he was five years old, his family moved to Guildford, Surrey, England, after his father, an oceanographer, accepted a research position there. Although Ishiguro grew up in Britain and became a British citizen in 1982, his Japanese heritage profoundly nurtured and shaped his imagination and early fiction. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent. He later earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where he studied under renowned novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He worked with homeless people before becoming a full-time novelist. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), established him as a significant literary voice immediately. He followed his initial success with a series of more acclaimed novels exploring memory, identity, loss, dignity, and the uncertainty of human recollection. His novel The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and brought him worldwide fame. Other celebrated works include Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and Klara and the Sun. In 2017, Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised him “...who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." Today he is regarded as one of the world's greatest living novelists. His novels in chronological order are A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015), Klara and the Sun (2021), and The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain (2025). Other major publications include The Gourmet (1987, television screenplay), The Saddest Music in the World (2003, screenplay), The White Countess (2005, screenplay), and Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009, short-story collection). Although several of his novels are classics, The Remains of the Day is generally considered Ishiguro's masterpiece and his most famous novel because it won the Booker Prize, has sold millions of copies, was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and appears regularly on lists of the greatest English-language novels. Never Let Me Go is probably his second most widely read novel, particularly among younger readers. Ishiguro's writing is distinctive for several reasons. Rather than dramatic confrontations, emotional revelations emerge gradually through restrained conversation and subtle observations—often through unreliable memory. Narrators with unreliable memory sincerely recount events, yet readers slowly realize that these and other memories are incomplete, selective, or distorted. Characters rarely express strong feelings openly. Much of the emotion lies beneath the surface. Important events are hinted at rather than fully described, requiring readers to infer meaning. The central conflicts occur within characters' minds rather than through external action. His sentences are generally clear and elegant, yet they explore complex ideas about regret, guilt, dignity, mortality, and identity. A Pale View of Hills is "elliptical" and an "elegy." In literature, elliptical means that the author deliberately leaves important information unstated. Readers must infer motivations, relationships, and even crucial events. A Pale View of Hills is elliptical because many conversations avoid saying what people truly feel; traumatic events are suggested rather than explained; the narrator may conceal painful truths; the relationship between Sachiko and Mariko mirrors aspects of Etsuko's own life without the novel explicitly confirming every parallel. Readers gradually piece together the deeper story from hints rather than direct statements. This style causes readers to think, and it pleases most readers. An elegy is a literary work expressing mourning, remembrance, or sorrow for what has been lost. A Pale View of Hills is an elegy because it mourns lives destroyed by World War II, postwar Nagasaki, broken families, lost innocence, vanished traditions, and, above all, Etsuko's daughter Keiko, whose suicide casts a shadow over the entire novel. The novel is less about the events themselves than about living with grief decades later. The principal characters in the novel are Etsuko – the narrator, now living in England, recalling her youth in Nagasaki after World War II. Keiko – Etsuko's older daughter, who dies by suicide before the novel begins. Niki – Etsuko's younger daughter, independent and modern, who visits her mother in England. Sachiko – Etsuko's friend in Nagasaki, dreaming of leaving Japan for America. Mariko – Sachiko's lonely and emotionally troubled daughter. Frank – an American soldier with whom Sachiko hopes to build a new life. Jiro – Etsuko's first husband. Ogata-san – Jiro's father, representing traditional Japanese values. A Pale View of Hills is a remarkably accomplished debut that announces many of the themes Kazuo Ishiguro would develop throughout his career. Readers, like me, will not only enjoy this first Ishiguro book, but will buy more to enjoy his other writings. The novel moves quietly between present-day England and postwar Nagasaki as Etsuko reflects on her past following the death of her eldest daughter. Rather than relying on dramatic plot twists, Ishiguro builds emotional power through memory, suggestion, and silence. The relationship between Etsuko, Sachiko, and their daughters becomes increasingly haunting, inviting readers to question whether memory, even in their own lives, can ever be fully trusted. Ishiguro’s restrained prose, combined with the novel’s lingering presence of grief, creates an atmosphere that is intimate and sometimes unsettling, but not off-putting. The novel is fascinating and raises interesting questions about guilt, identity, motherhood, and the ways people reshape painful memories to continue living. It is a subtle, moving work that rewards careful reading and often reveals new meanings upon a second reading. Readers can draw many enduring lessons from A Pale View of Hills, such as: Memory is imperfect. People often remember the past in imperfect ways that protect them from unbearable pain. Unresolved grief endures. Emotional wounds may remain long after outward recovery. Parents' choices, like all human acts, have consequences and will shape children's lives. Even decisions made with good intentions can have unforeseen consequences. Trauma affects generations. The scars of war and family loss can influence children and grandchildren. The novel also shows that cultures change rapidly after upheaval. The novel explores tensions between long-held traditions and modernization in postwar Japan. Silence has consequences. Avoiding difficult conversations may deepen misunderstanding and isolation. Compassion matters. Many characters are lonely or emotionally isolated, reminding readers of the importance of empathy. Literature can reveal truth indirectly. Ishiguro demonstrates that suggestion, ambiguity, and restraint can sometimes express emotional realities more powerfully than explicit explanation. Truth is revealed in many ways if one pays attention. Readers will find that A Pale View of Hills is a meditation on how people live with memory and loss. Rather than offering easy answers, it invites readers to reflect on the complexity of human relationships, the burdens of the past, and the quiet resilience - the process and capacity of successfully adapting to challenging life experiences - required to move forward toward future rewards. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Debut with a Compelling, Spooky Story *by R***S on January 3, 2022* It is impossible not to finish *Pale View of the Hills* with a sense of bewilderment. The ending is very enigmatic and inconclusive, which some readers have judged as a sign of inexperience of a first novel. Although quite surprising, it does feel like a M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth-Sense plot twist--something explicitly and almost artificially placed at the end of the story to thrill audiences as it brings a totally new light (or haze, if you will), almost a cliché that Ishiguro wisely decided not use in other novels (but Shyamalan unwisely just can't give up.) So, yes, there is something loose in the structure of PVH that feels inexperienced, but still, the whole novel is far from an unpleasant journey, because it already brings many of the qualities of Ishiguro's later novels. And this one is quite spooky. Japan is famous for its 'obake' ghost stories, tales about creepy ghosts of women with long, black hair (think of *The Ring*). It is interesting to research on the term right now and learn from Wiki that, literally, 'obake' means *a thing that changes*, referring to a state of transformation or shape-shifting. I guess Ishiguro didn't have this idea in mind when he wrote *PVH*. There is no explicitly supernatural element in the story and, structurally, what runs underneath the main plot of the characters is much more a detective story about a sequence of Bolaño-like misterious crimes than anything else. However, and I can't explain exactly why, this novel felt to me as creepy as one of those obake stories because of some rather disturbing scenes and details, and the fact that things change so much at the end makes it quite consistent with the concept of 'obake', in a contemporary format. Nagasaki also comes to the story with this purpose, as I read it. Of course it was quite natural that Ishiguro would choose a familiar environment of his ancestry as subject of his first novel, but being a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb and then fully reconstructed, Nagasaki seemed to me charged with a lot of symbolic value--particularly when put into the context of lives that were also, in different perspectives, destroyed and wrecked, and then rebuilt in a way to hide all scars as if nothing ever happened. That is why the image of the Nagasaki harbor, seen from the top of the Inasa Mountain in the beginning of Part 2, was a very strong image to me. Inasa's is also the pale view of the hills that Etsuko saw from the window of her apartment in Nagasaki, making constant change of perspective a central symbol of the book. Well into the novel, Etsuko the narrator, says: "Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here." Ishiguro is famous for his unreliable narrators and his ability to hide and surgically reveal to his reader what he is really talking about (something he does extremely well in *Never Let Me Go*) and in *PVH* I could sense the first, still somewhat reluctant steps of his in that direction. The fact that people in Japan are known for their reticence, always not externally declaring/revealing what they are really feeling (out of a mix of introspection, decorum and a strict social code) is also very instrumental for Ishiguro to build his dualities and subtleties in this novels, something (I guess) he would then transcribe to the formalities of the English society in the 1930s in *The Remains of the Day*. I began ranking *PHV* with a 3-star to distinguish it from *Never Let Me Go*, imho, still one of his best books, but as all elements and nuances of the story settled in my mind I noticed how I liked it and how it was appealing, however spooky, and still leaving interesting ideas to think about. ### ⭐⭐⭐ Drop swHome acid before reading. *by B***! on March 23, 2013* A complex "thinking person's" novel that you would work well if Charles Manson had a book club.. The book plays serious head games with you and requires a lot of patience. In some ways there are moments where it feels like you're watching the film Groundhog Day (this book came out before the movie) Very uplifting material (sarcasm) about a mother dealing with the suicide of her daughter, however it could also be perceived in a variety of different ways. Some moments are graphic - the kitten being strangled by the neck underwater was so eloquently written I thought of it as a good story to read a child as a bedtime story. If you have the patience, you'll enjoy it but I must warn you its likely you'll have to read it again just to make sure you read it the first time. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.in/products/8649498-a-pale-view-of-hills](https://www.desertcart.in/products/8649498-a-pale-view-of-hills) --- *Product available on Desertcart India* *Store origin: IN* *Last updated: 2026-09-13*