Nocturnes : five stories of music and nightfall / Kazuo Ishiguro.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 as a result, these men and women find themselves at a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp. In an exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Ishiguro reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of his acclaimed and best-selling works of fiction.