Drawing on his letters and papers, ‘Nocturne’ is a fictionalised yet biographically-rooted novel of the life of Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). As the nation’s greatest composer of the second half of the 20th century, Britten was also a deeply complex individual with a rich, and at times conflicted, inner life. Ranging over this prolific composer’s whole life and the totality of his works, novelist A. L.Young (who has previously fictionalised the life of Frederick Delius), movingly dramatises the humanity of Benjamin Britten.