Sing It Back to Me

On Palm Sunday the choir sinks half a step during an unaccompanied verse, and Roz brings the organ back in at pitch, a whole line against them. She never hears the clash. She sees it in the little mirror over the console, on nineteen faces.

Her audiologist says the hearing aids are finished. The next step is a cochlear implant, and an implant would take what is left of the real sound in her right ear. Meanwhile Huw Jenkins, the booming bass who runs the chapel committee and the town’s October hymn festival, wants to hire an organist from Allentown “to take the pressure off.”

Then Roz learns Huw’s secret: the most admired voice in four counties has never been able to read a note of music. So they make a trade. On Monday nights at her kitchen table, she will teach him to read. At every rehearsal, he will be her ears.

But Huw has his own reasons for pushing her toward surgery, and the decision Roz has to make is one nobody can make for her.

A warm, wise novel about music, late love, and deciding who you are when the thing you do best begins to slip away. Book Three of The Penrose Street Stories. It stands alone.