Suddenly-widowed Maisie sets out to clear her late husband's collection; wonky furniture and balding rugs, bolts of material for upholstery projects he never got round to, gloomy pictures and outmoded electronics, other people's trash brought home from car boot sales and rescued from the tip. The hoard is endless, all part of Clifford's waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful. Now, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk.

As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues that drove her husband to squirrel away other people's rubbish. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands - much too late - the man she married.