Macon Leary likes the ordinary. A travel writer who hates travel, he prefers instead to indulge in the comforts of home. His travel guides, authored with the traveling businessman in mind, offers not the points of interest, but the places of familiarity in these foreign locales. 
     But with his son's death, Leary's simple, orderly life is thrown into chaos. His marriage is crumbling around him, his wife Sarah has left him, and an injury forces him to move back in with his siblings accompanied by his dog Edward, who is too willful to be negotiated with. Leary is out of his depth, until he meets the charming and vivacious Muriel, a dog-obedience trainer with a strange sense of fashion and a whirlwind of personality. Wrangling both Edward and Macon, Muriel up-ends Macon's insular world and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.