Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character. A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap” his talent . . . Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of the two—determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp. An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed works of fiction.

In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

"You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay..." The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years. Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war. Included on TIME Magazine's "THE 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME"

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life. Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification – and the highest praise.

Librarian note: This a previously-published edition of ISBN 9780571225378. In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories take on a disturbing cast.

The maze of human memory--the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it--is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present. Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances. The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires--a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding--may give rise to the most complicated truths. A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his best.

Klara es una AA, una Amiga Artificial, especializada en el cuidado de niños. Pasa sus días en una tienda, espe­rando a que alguien la adquiera y se la lleve a una casa, un hogar. Mientras espera, contempla el exterior desde el escaparate. Observa a los transeúntes, sus actitu­des, sus gestos, su modo de caminar, y es testigo de algunos episodios que no acaba de entender, como una extraña pelea entre dos taxistas. Klara es una AA sin­gular, más observadora, más dada a hacerse preguntas que la mayoría de sus congéneres. Y como sus compa­ñeros, necesita del Sol para alimentarse, para cargarse de energía... Narrada por la curiosa e inquisitiva Klara, un ser artificial que se hace preguntas muy humanas, la novela explora la esencia del ser humano y lanza preguntas turbado­ras: ¿qué es lo que nos define como humanos?, ¿cuál es nuestro papel en el mundo?, ¿qué es el amor?...

Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 0571225381 here. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison. But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah Vaughan sings through the speakers, he struggles to control everything the sound brings with it. In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting. Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

كازو إيشيغورو في هذه الرواية، التي نشرها كازو إيشيغورو عام 1986، يصور الكاتب الياباني الأصل - البريطاني الجنسية، اليابان بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية، حيث يحاول الناس انتشال أنفسهم من حطام الحرب. ويتأمل الرسام الشهير ماسوجي أونو ماضيه، بعد أن توقف عن الرسم ووبدأ يعتني بحديقته، ويفكر في مستقبل ابنتيه وحفيده. إن ماضي اليابان القريب بنزعته العسكرية الصاعدة، التي أدت إلى هزيمته المدوية خلال الحرب، تقض مضجع أونو وتجعله يعيد النظر في دوره قبل الحرب وتدفعه إلى الاعتذار والنظر إلى مسيرته الفنية بعين أخرى. ولد كازو إيشيغورو عام 1954 في مدينة ناغازاكي اليابانية، التي ألقت عليها القوات الأمريكية قنبلة ذرية عام 1945. وقد انتقل مع والديه إلى إنجلترا عام 1960 ليستقر هناك ويبدأ الكتابة باللغ&#1

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go comes a gorgeously illustrated volume of lyrics written for the platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated jazz singer Stacey Kent. Memorably introduced by Ishiguro himself, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain collects the lyrics of sixteen songs he wrote for world-renowned American singer Stacey Kent, which were set to music by her partner, Jim Tomlinson. An exquisite coming together of the literary and musical worlds, the lyrics are infused with a sense of yearning, melancholy, love, and the romance of travel and liminal spaces. Further exploring the notion of collaboration and interpretation, the collection is illustrated by the acclaimed Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli, whose work perfectly captures the atmosphere and sensibility of the songs.

First published in Firebird 2, ed. T J Binding (Penguin, 1983).

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?