Life sucks when you are a vacuum cleaner-salesman facing redundancy, and your wife of nearly forty years fills your days and nights with incessant chatter. But when Gloria suddenly and alarmingly stops talking, the silence is more than fifty-nine-year-old Bernard can bear. In desperation, Bernard turns to his ex-daughter-in-law for help. Meg has issues of her own, and her bright and funny daughter Ella sometimes wonders if her mum is trying so hard to keep her safe it stops them both from spreading their wings.

Will Meg’s suspicious nature thwart her chance encounter with the kindly but engimatic Hal? And is there still hope for Bernard and Gloria on the other side of silence?