THE STORY: Sara Goode, an enormously successful American woman working as the British representative of a major Hong Kong bank, is about to celebrate her fifty-fourth birthday, and she isn't exactly too happy about it. Firmly ensconced in her lovely London home, she leads a quiet, almost cold, expatriate life with her daughter, Tess. For the birthday celebration, her two sisters, Gorgeous Teitelbaum (Dr. Gorgeous, loving housewife and mother, of Newton, MA, who has her own call-in radio advice program and hopes to make the leap to TV), and Pfeni Rosensweig (peripatetic third-world travel writer, alas, unmarried), are expected to arrive at any moment. As if this weren't causing Sara enough stress, Mervyn Kant shows up at her door, and she doesn't even know the man, who, at first sight, is instantly smitten with her. Mervyn is a furrier, and a friend of Geoffrey's, the on-again, off-again, bi-sexual lover of Pfeni. After her sisters arrive for the celebration, Tess, and her boyfriend, Tom, turn up and advise her that they're planning on rushing off to his ancestral Lithuania for reasons of political protest. Next to arrive is Nicholas, the stuffy Brit whom Sara has been seeing although he seems somewhat anti-Semitic.

All of this adds up to a rather interesting evening, which leads to unexpected romance, suspected partings, recriminations, reconciliations and, above all, newfound love and acceptance.