Agnostic theologian Bernard Walsh has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his father, Jack, it is not in quest of a vacation paradise; it is to visit Jack’s dying, estranged sister. The hand of fate and family tensions frustrate the planned reunion, however. And surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, girls looking for Mr Right, a freeloading anthropologist, and assorted tourists all determinedly pursuing their humdrum visions of paradise, Bernard finds Waikiki more like purgatory. Until, that is, he stumbles upon something he had given up hope of finding – the astonishing possibility of love