A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills is the first novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in February 1982 and the winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize that year.

The book is short, and almost all of it happens inside Etsuko's memory of one summer in a ruined city, where the people around her are rebuilding their lives in a time when very little has been decided about what those lives will be. Sachiko is a widow with a small daughter, and her plans to leave Japan depend on an American soldier, on money and on a kind of optimism Etsuko watches with increasing discomfort. Ishiguro writes the recollection in a flat, courteous voice, which is what makes the novel unsettling, since a reader who pays attention will notice that some of what Etsuko reports does not fit together. It is a book about grief, immigration and the difference between what a person did and what she has decided she did, and those interests run through all of the fiction written afterwards. A film adaptation was released in 2025.