The Unconsoled

Ryder is a celebrated pianist arriving in a Central European city to give a concert of apparently enormous civic importance. He does not know quite what the concert involves, or why it matters so much to this particular city. As he attempts to prepare, he finds himself drawn into an endless succession of obligations, encounters, and detours — each perfectly comprehensible in itself, each slightly wrong, the aggregate forming a cityscape of mounting strangeness that he cannot navigate because its logic is the logic of a dream.

Ishiguro’s most ambitious and most divisive novel — deliberately structured as an extended dream, demanding complete surrender to its logic — The Unconsoled is either a maddening failure or a profound achievement depending on the reader’s willingness to follow it where it goes. Those who follow it find something irreplaceable: a novel about the impossibility of presence, about the gap between our obligations and our capacity to fulfil them, that has no equivalent in world fiction.

One of the bravest and most extraordinary novels of the twentieth century. Published by Faber & Faber.