Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall [Hardcover]

'A fine and moving collection of stories, displaying his unique combination of the sad, the stoic and the consoling. It's about failure, but it dignifies failure, and with it, the human condition.' --Margaret Drabble, Guardian Books of the Year

'These stories come up on you quietly, but then haunt you for days.' --David Sexton, Evening Standard

'A lovely, clever book about the passage of time and the soaring notes that makes its journey worthwhile.' --Independent on Sunday --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'It was our third time playing the Godfather theme since lunch...'

In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.

Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Primio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize). He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.