In Adam Rapp's Nocturne, an unforgiving father puts a gun in his son's mouth, prompting the shattered mother to desert her family and her sanity. The seventeen year old son escapes to New York City to seek an uneasy refuge in books. Across the decade and a half that follows he tries to cope with the ramifications of his own anguish and estrangement while making a desperate search for redemption culminating in his reinventing himself as a writer.