Julie Hodgson

Carry On Singing Julie Hodgson

If she had been asked just months before whether preparing to sing solo in front of this applauding audience could have possibly been in her future, she would have laughed, but so much seemed unimaginable then: Portugal, sunshine the virus, the choir, even her cropped, peroxide hair, which still surprised her and made her smile every time she looked in a mirror. When middle-aged, Scottish writer Rosie Wilkins goes to Ponte de Sor after a confrontation with her husband and joins a Portuguese choir, it's only supposed to be for a few weeks, at most a month, just until he comes to his senses, realises what it would mean to lose her, and things can go back to normal ... And then Lockdown happens, and she's quarantined in a strange apartment with only the neighbour from hell and the ladies of the now-online choir for company The reforming man-eater, the therapist with a greater need for therapy than any of her clients and the woman spending Lockdown trying to spice things up with her husband-whether he likes it or not. At first, a reluctant observer of online choir life, as the weeks pass and the ladies rehearse for a performance that may never happen, Rosie is dragged into the lives of her new friends and swept up in the transformative power of music, forcing her to reassess her life, her relationship and herself ... Things may never be the same again.