The Unconsoled is the story of a man named Ryder. He is a pianist of international renown who, as the novel opens, has arrived in a European city he cannot identify to give a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. In the days before the concert, he is led in and out of the lives of seeming strangers, but his fleeting recollections of them and of his purpose among them are invariably overwhelmed by their inexplicable knowledge and expectations of him. What they want of him (what they may already have) may be revealed somewhere amid the physical and emotional landscapes he finds himself traversing: by turns eerie and comical and, always, strangely malleable - as a dream might be, or a nightmare, or the day-to-day reality of a man whose public self has taken on a life of its own.