Summary from GoodReads:

In this sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores love, music and the passage of time. This quintet ranges from Italian piazzas to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the “hush-hush floor” of an exclusive Hollywood hotel. Along the way we meet young dreamers, café musicians and faded stars, all at some moment of reckoning.

Gentle, intimate and witty, Nocturnes is underscored by a haunting theme: the struggle to restoke life’s romance, even as relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

My Review:

I generally have a really hard time with how authors portray musicians in books – especially classical musicians.  I set aside my trepidation, because I’d had previous experience with Ishiguro’s work, and I figured if anyone could do this right, he could.

Folks, he knocked it out of the ballpark.

This selection of short stories has one thing wrong with it.  It’s too short.  Every single story had me wrapped up, so intent on what was happening that I didn’t want to put the book down.  I greedily devoured stories of street musicians, homely musicians, and even fake musicians.  At the end of each story I eagerly jumped into the next, ready to be whisked away again.  It wasn’t until recently that I began to appreciate the power that the short story has, and between Daphne du Maurier and now Kazuo Ishiguro, I think it’s going to be very hard to find other collections that can measure up.

Brilliantly written, simple yet complicated, and a collection that deserves a place on the most critical of bookshelves – I highly recommend you pick this one up soon.

Don’t just take my word for it! Check out what these bloggers say!

Medieval Bookworm

Yat-Yee Chong