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 A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his A young cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap” his 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.