It charts the breakdown of a working class family when the teenage daughter befriends a refugee girl. Helen has been married to Paul for 25 years. They live a monotonous and frozen existence. Helen is desperate, damaged, and looking for change. Paul — bitter, hypocritical and bigoted, sick and tired of being in the poverty trap — is on the brink of a breakdown. His biggest fear is change.

Into their lives comes Tasha, a Romany Czech refugee, awaiting her British passport and her chance for freedom — a concept taken for granted by all those around her. Told in three revelatory narratives, each from a particular character's point of view, reveals how the disintegration of an ordinary working class family finally comes to a head when unexpected emotions are unleashed.