Forty years on from the greatest music festival of all-time, comes the most personal story of them all; from a man who didn’t hear a single note. It is the summer of 2005 and when his daughter announces that she is pregnant and plans to turn her back on a promising postgraduate musical career, fifty-six year old novelist and rock music aficionado, Joseph Morrison finds himself forced to re-evaluate his own life. He finds himself recalling the friendship he had as a child in 1950s Belfast with the elderly, yet beguiling shopkeeper, Mr. Rimbaud. He finds himself too, back in 1969, the year he took his first trip abroad, heading for Bethel, New York and one of the greatest cultural events of the 20th century, The Woodstock Music & Arts Festival.

Having arrived three days too late, Joseph meets the last remaining person left at the festival, an archetypal, spaced-out hippie-chick who refers to herself only as Janis. Having persuaded the young Irishman to escort her back home to Port Arthur, Texas, Janis proceeds to lead Joseph on an awakening road trip across the States that will leave both of them changed for life. Traveling through Tennessee, into the Mississippi Delta and beyond, and encountering a dead hobo, a dysfunctional hillbilly family and a distracted police officer along the way, the two find themselves drawn into a slow-burning friendship that neither ever expected. After finally confiding her true identity to him as they near their journey’s end, Janis then tells Joseph that she is suffering from cancer, but disappears in the middle of the night, leaving the young man wondering about her fate for more than thirty years.