A Choir for Broken Women

Every family inherits something. The Muir women inherited silence.Fiona Doyle used to sing in rooms where people stopped breathing to listen.Now people remember her for the night she broke.Three months after a champagne glass, a television presenter and one spectacularly public collapse turned her grief into national entertainment, Fiona wants nothing to do with stages, journalists or anyone offering her an inspirational second chance.Unfortunately, her sister has other ideas.Saint Bernadette’s women’s choir rehearses in a battered Belfast parish hall with bad heating, worse coffee and absolutely no chance of making anyone forget Fiona’s former career.The women aren’t polished.They’re widowed, exhausted, furious, pregnant, lonely, underpaid and carrying things nobody thought to ask about.And they keep singing anyway.What begins as an unwanted exercise in getting Fiona out of the house becomes something far more dangerous: somewhere she wants to return to.Then a recording of the choir goes viral.Suddenly the journalists are back. The hall is under financial threat. Old secrets surrounding another woman begin pushing their way into daylight, and anonymous messages warn the choir what happens when women refuse to stay quiet.Fiona knows exactly what public attention can cost.This time, however, she isn’t standing alone.Beside her are Brid, the stubborn choir director holding the room together; Nessa, a young widow learning how to want things after loss; Róisín, whose humour is almost as formidable as her rage; Orla, whose quiet kindness has teeth; and a room full of women who have finally discovered that being called broken does not mean being powerless.Because the choir was never about singing perfectly.It was about having somewhere to make a sound.And when someone tries to silence them, twenty broken women are about to discover just how loud survival can become.A Choir for Broken Women is an emotionally rich contemporary women’s novel about grief, female friendship, public shame, imperfect love and the extraordinary power of finding a room where nobody asks you to hide what survival cost.