[also posted on LibraryThing and LivingSocial]
This is Ishiguro's latest, a collection of five short stories all built around the theme of music. According to [...], a nocturne can be a "painting of a night scene" or an "instrumental composition of a pensive, dreamy mood." Despite the book's subtitle being Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, only two of the five stories have their main events occurring at night. It is the second definition which better suits this collection. Each story is well written, as you'd expect from Ishiguro, and each one forces you to think about it afterwards; they are deceptively simple. Ishiguro's writing is very subtle and understated, there is a lot more between the lines.
My favourite story was the third one, "Malvern Hills", in which a young, struggling musician has an interesting encounter with a couple of Swedish folk singers in England's Malvern Hills. That one was quite moving. Two of the stories, "Crooner" and "Nocturne" are loosely connected through one of the characters, which was a pleasant surprise. "Nocturne" was the most entertaining of the collection, for me, and left me wanting more because it ended without revealing the narrator's fate.
