Nocturnes

Five stories linked by music: a musician on a Venice gondola, a jazz guitarist trying to survive in London, a cellist in Rome navigating his mid-career crisis, a failed musician in an English pub, and a saxophonist spending one strange night in a luxury hotel. Music is what connects them — but so is something else, something harder to name: the gap between what they imagined their lives would be and what those lives have actually become, and the question of whether that gap is a tragedy or simply life.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes is something rare: a collection of stories in which the form is not a fallback but a genuine choice, each story requiring its compression and nothing more, the five together constituting something as sustained and as resonant as a novel.

Essential Ishiguro — and a beautiful introduction to his work for readers who want to approach him through shorter forms. Published by Faber & Faber.