Nocturnes

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us
his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched
interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and
essential character. A once-popular singer desperate to
make a comeback turning from the one certainty in his life
. . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only
thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling
singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing
marriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted
underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe
that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young
cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap” his talent . . .
Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of
the two—determines the place of music in each of these
lives. And in one way or another music delivers each of
them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic sometimes
tragic sometimes just eluding their grasp. An exploration
of love need and the ineluctable force of the past
Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with
extraordinary precision and subtlety and with the
arresting psychological and emotional detail that has
marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed works of fiction.