Julie Prentice is forty. She has a wealthy and successful husband and a gifted teenage son. But despite that she has everything, she feels increasingly insubstantial and her uncertainty about her life leads to depression. When a reckless liaison destroys her marriage, she is rejected by her husband and son, and she becomes a wanderer. Eventually, she arrives in a remote village high in the Himalaya, where she hopes to see the rhododendron forests beloved of her nurseryman father. There, she rediscovers her love of and talent for singing. It is the first step in a difficult journey through Asia, Europe and then America, seeking meaning and purpose, and hoping to find a way to recover the love of her son. But she begins to sing. She discovers the blues, and sings with bands in Prague and Berlin, but she knows she must go to the home of the blues - America, where with great trepidation, she will meet again the band that caused her downfall.