The Unconsoled cover art

The Unconsoled

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Unconsoled

By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

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 study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification - and the highest praise.

©2018 Faber & Faber (P)2018 Faber & Faber Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Psychological Mind-bending

Listeners also enjoyed...

 When We Were Orphans cover art
Next Season cover art
Mr. Vertigo cover art
Unhappenings cover art
Timeless Tales for Kids cover art
Doomsday Book cover art
The Restoration of Otto Laird cover art

Critic reviews

"The Unconsoled is a masterpiece...it is above all a book devoted to the human heart, and as such Ishiguro's greatest gift to us yet." (The Times)

"A work of great interest and originality.... Ishiguro has mapped out an aesthetic territory that is all his own...frankly fantastic [and] fiercer and funnier than before." (The New Yorker)

"He is an original and remarkable genius….The Unconsoled is the most original and remarkable book he has so far produced." (New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant  
Beautifully written; the prose reminds me of M John Harrison's, and Simon Vance's narration is top class as usual.

*** Possible spoilers ***

It is a long novel and I can understand why people become confused and give up. Taken at face value it makes no sense and the inconsistencies pile up from page one, but once you understand the basic premise, things begin to come together.

The implicit backstory is that Mr Ryder, a mediocre pianist with a drink problem, gets married and the couple have a child. Ryder's low-paid work frequently takes him away from home and this, together with Ryder's bullying and indifference towards his son, leads to friction with his wife and culminates in a bitter separation. At the end of his life, Mr Ryder falls into a delusional state whereby he symbolically relives key elements of his life, from his youth - desperately eager to please his hyper-critical and overbearing parents - to his later life, where he attempts to confront his habitual willingness to please those around him and his guilt at not having been a good husband or father. In order to deal with all this he constructs for himself the persona of a world-famous pianist, revered and respected by those around him, touring an unnamed but strangely familiar European city. In this place, various aspects of his personality are presented to him as third parties and strangers turn out to be friends and family. It is this latter story that forms the narrative of the book, the backstory needing to be pieced together from the unfolding events.

A really, really good read.

A masterpiece

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Utterly absorbing and magical - listening each night has been like re-entering an ongoing dream where there is that unrelenting yet delightful tension - nothing is resolved but yet you are compelled to travel onwards, discovering familar but distorted scenes and lives. The narrator breathed life into each character - so well individualised that I could visualise each one completely, his tone reassuring and maintaining gravitas yet verging on somnolence - so right for this book. I will seek him out again.

The tension is compellingly unrelenting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Hard to know where to begin, it’s a dreamlike walk through the life/memory of Ryder, its protagonist. Just the construction of the novel is clever in the extreme but its content covers all of Ryders emotions with great sensitivity. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever heard. I don’t think if I was reading it I would have enjoyed it as much as listening to it. It’s a particularly good narration.

Masterpiece of a story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved originality and psychology of human obsession with self without concern for others or awareness. Felt like a dream with no end; timeless and repetitive cycles of suffering

Complexity of life as a dream

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
How does one go about describing this amazing book. Seemingly written in dream logic. Kafkaesque, poignant and very funny in parts (the porters dance in the Hungarian Cafe, an ironing board used as a crutch). I've read it twice before and then listened to this marvelous narration. Simon Vance catches all the nuances in the text and has a beautifully modulated voice, not a crushed cadences missed. Thoroughly recomended. It a masterpiece and utterly original.

What happen to number nine?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of the oddest books read (or listened to), not in a Murikami purposefully surreal kind of way, but in a way where the reader wouldn’t be surprised if Ishiguro sat down one day and wrote this thing as a random stream of consciousness with little or no understanding of an end destination. There's no trace of 'usual' sensory sequence - time and space has a circular dreamlike quality, which isn’t unappealing, but with so little anchor into anything the reader can often get largely disorientated. And then the characters - a mix of bumbling, often pretentious, overly verbose and frustratingly parochial people... Before I knew (or at least had a strong sense) this was purposeful, I found myself getting hugely frustrated with the book and its occupants, however after giving in to it totally, following the book is like getting swept in an oddly satisfying current - there's no other way to describe it other than 'dreamlike'. Aside from the palpable (but from the author's perspective, purposeful) frustration felt in the pages of The Unconsoled, I found myself laughing out loud at the quick, dry wit - so sharp, it cuts through the otherwise cloud-like drowsiness of the rest of the book. And then, through the fog, there are gems of pure humanity - astute psychological, social and cultural observations carefully woven through inter-personal relationships and interactions, that take you off-guard. From what I have read of other reviews, this book is hugely divisive. This book took me on a journey (or perhaps emotional roller-coaster) that started with confusion, which led to frustration, and ended in amazement. I am on the 'masterpiece' end of the reviewers dichotomy. How many books can elicit such an incredible range of emotions. If you're looking for a tightly-knit satisfyingly sequential narrative, look elsewhere. If you want to go on a journey, read (or listen to, the performance is excellent) The Unconsoled.

What just happened

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I like Ishiguro but struggled with this book. It’s one for those with a tolerance for ambiguity. There’s no plot as such and it’s all about characters’ internal states and the atmosphere. I stopped at around a third of the way through having become convinced it was just going to be more of the same. One for those who enjoy being set adrift in a surreal cityscape. A world of unclear expectations and unresolved emotions

Increasingly tedious

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I thought this was excellent, but I understand people's difficulty with it. The dream logic is unexpected and unusual. The array of bizarre characters with their hangups and illogicality could be hard for someone expecting a cleaner narrative. But I was swept along, and absolutely loved it.

Dreamlike, frustrating and affecting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautifully written in a kind of quantum dreamscape this heartfelt tale of missed opportunities flows wonderfully from one scenario to the next with some amazing characters and exquisite humour.

Beautifully written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I got half way and had to stop. The plot is thin and too dream-like in its structure. It started to annoy me and as much as I enjoyed the performance I simply had no interest in continuing. I felt if I kept listening I’d be rewarded with no real feeling of satisfaction by the end and I just didn’t care enough about any of the characters to see how things turned out.

Couldn’t finish

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews