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Nocturnes

by Kazuo Ishiguro

I have loved every minute of submerging myself into these five short stories about music and nightfall. Ishiguro engages you so quickly and deftly with the lives of these characters that you forget you are reading at all.

He glides you through the landscapes of piazzas and canals in Venice, then lets you into a London flat, offers an escape to the Malvern Hills, traps you in the strangeness of a Hollywood hotel and finally leads you back to the dark romance of a café in Italy. Although music and stars connect these stories there is a beautiful exploration of love that is found, fading and lost in each one. Ishiguro fuses the love of art with romantic love and shows the inevitable struggle to keep them vibrant and honest.

The spell of music and night cast by this elegant writer draws you into unique windows of experience you wish you could keep peeking into well after the story concludes. This collection of stories is hypnotising and beautiful.