"Could the meaning of life on earth be the constant progress towards an indefinite goal - the design and production of increasingly powerful technologies, the development of increasingly complex and incomprehensible forms of culture? Could all these emerge and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same: to live and coexist with other people?"

Alice is a young writer who grew up in Dublin. She has been living in New York for a few years and then, as part of her recovery from a nervous breakdown, she decides to move to a beautiful house in the countryside of Ireland, a place from which most people seek to escape. There she meets her peer Felix, who is struggling working in a warehouse, and soon she proposes to accompany her to Rome, where she will travel to promote the Italian translation of her book. Meanwhile, in Dublin, her best friend Aileen works for a literary magazine, makes little money, tries to overcome her breakup, and flirts with her childhood friend Simon.

Alice, Felix, Aileen, and Simon are all around thirty - but they feel that life is passing them by slowly. They fall in love, demystify one myth of their lives after another, find and separate again. They wonder about love, sex, friendship, about the definition and meaning of success, but also about how one can hope for the best in a usually desperate and despairing world. Are they perhaps in the last bright room of the world before darkness falls forever? Are they witnesses to a great change? Will they find a way to believe that there really is a beautiful world?