The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Though published in 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel — narrated by a buttoned-up English butler whose retrospective road trip reveals a life of repression, misplaced loyalty, and missed romantic opportunity — has only grown in literary stature in the 21st century. Its portrait of a man who confuses professional dignity with human decency remains one of literature's most devastating dissections of self-deception.