Kazuo Ishiguro – Nocturnes: Five Stories

Financial Times“Coolly observes the absurd nature of human relationships...” Each of these stories is told in the voice of a laconic, colloquial first-person narrator, with no recourse to metaphor or extravagant figures of speech, and yet comes loaded with enormous emotional weight...

Book Bag“Not yet reviewed”

The New Yorker“Not yet reviewed”

The New York Times“Ishiguro generally achieves the merely ordinary...” These five too-easy pieces are neither absorbingly serious nor engagingly frivolous: a real problem with a musical set, and a disaster, if only in a minor key, when it’s a question of prose...

The Independent“sounds a sustained note of bittersweet melancholy...” The ease of the prose, with its misleading smoothness, lulls the reader into a false sense of security. Seemingly gentle narratives of melancholia morph to take into account other themes. Not least the East-West divide...

Scotsman“Easy and agreeably pleasant reading...” The stories here are essentially trivial. Perhaps they have been thrown off in an interval between more demanding work. As it is, they seem to have asked little of the author...

Publishers Weekly“Not yet reviewed”

Guardian“Not yet reviewed”

The Times“Gentle mood pieces about music and nightfall...” now it is clear that this exquisite stylist is serious in his pursuit of a minimal - perhaps even universal - mode of expression for the emotional experiences that define our lives as human...

The Telegraph“Music is the thread binding disparate people together...” While the emotional territory may be familiar, the tone is not. Here, when brittle codes of behaviour break down, the result veers more often towards farce than tragedy – although tragedy is never that far away...