Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

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Five stories set in the borderland between aspiration and regret, where musicians, dreamers, and faded stars confront the gap between the lives they imagined and the lives they're living. A café guitarist plays one last song for a famous crooner. A saxophonist undergoes cosmetic surgery on the "hush-hush floor" of a Hollywood hotel. A couple's marriage begins to unravel during a Venetian holiday. Kazuo Ishiguro's only short story collection shares the themes of his novels — the passage of time, the performance of identity, the things we sacrifice for art — but in a register that is gentler, more intimate, and often unexpectedly funny. Music provides the connective tissue: each story is a nocturne, played in the key of might-have-been. Stories about the romance of life and the difficulty of keeping it alive — composed by a master of the art of quiet devastation.