The Marrying Game opens on Christmas Eve, with four sisters at home worrying about money. The setting is present-day England, and the girls’ father, an eccentric aristocrat, has just died, leaving the Hasty family so impoverished that they are about to lose their splendid but crumbling house. So the two oldest sisters–Rufa, tall, elegant, and too serious for her own good; and Nancy, a gorgeous, irreverent redhead who relishes her work as a part-time barmaid in the local pub–decide that the way to redeem the family fortunes is to marry money. Surely it can’t be that hard to find two very rich men and make the men fall in love with them.

Thus begins a gloriously modern story that makes us genuinely care about the whole Hasty family. As Rufa and Nancy set out to blaze a trail through London society, they find that nothing in The Marrying Game turns out quite the way they’ve planned.