Anna has a big birthday coming up and is planning the party to end all parties, but fate is determined to ensure that getting the guest list right is going to be traumatic. Ordering the canapés becomes fraught when just weeks before the big day she spots Jane, the catering queen, dallying on the doorstep of a man who isn't her tragically disabled husband. Then there's her best friend Glynis, a city lawyer and fashionista who has suddenly become broody, and the kids: the eldest, James pining for his lost love, off to university in the Big Smoke. And what of Anna's own lost love, Mack, the bad boy she left home for? This time when he turns up he wants to take them all back with him to the sun, sand, and surf of Hawaii. It seems that deciding on the guest list won't be the year's biggest question after all.