The main character, Béla Hackspacher, is a forklift driver. He lives in a small rented flat with his wife Irén, his two children, his mother-in-law and Rózsika, a subtenant who is about to become a dance singer. Béla learns at a community cultural programme that he has a 12 on the toto. The show stops, to great joy. The day arrives, 23 October 1956, when Béla can collect his prize.

A primary school teacher with an inferiority complex about her weight, a bank clerk who suddenly develops a strange rash around her eyes, an aging owner of a 24-hour deli in an unhappy marriage, a lonely man living in the woods and strangers' cottages. They can continue to survive with their problems, hide them, and not deal with them. Or they can fight it and, at the cost of scars and wounds, improve their lives.