Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall » (Unabridged)

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and now lives in London, England. Each of his understated, finely wrought novels has been published to international acclaim. He was in both of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists anthologies, and won the Booker Prize at thirty-four for Remains of the Day.

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...

The Barnes & Noble Review

If a different writer had published a book with the same title as Kazuo Ishiguro's collection of stories, the reader might be tempted to groan at its preciousness. Nocturnes -- could there be a more self-consciously arty word, with its memories of Schubert and Chopin? And doesn't the subtitle make things worse, insisting too grandly on melody and melancholy? Yet Ishiguro, as readers of his fiction know, is anything but a conventional or pretty writer. In his previous book, Never Let Me Go, he conjured the most convincing dystopia in recent literary fiction: an alternative England where human clones are raised in segregated schools, until their organs are harvested for the benefit of "real" people. That the clones are every bit as real as their originals is less disturbing, in Ishiguro's novel, than the intricate ways they justify and reconcile themselves to their fate. With typical indirection, Ishiguro turned his sci-fi premise into a parable of the ways we learn to live in our own world of injustice and despair.

Crooner Come Rain or Come Shine Malvern Hills Nocturne Cellists