A beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together. Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways -- in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart -- the renters struggle to navigate daily existence and soon come to realize that Ediths deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together. Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants -- Paulie, an unusually disabled man, and his burdened sister, Claudia Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke -- must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them family, respite, security, worth, love.
