How wonderful it is for those who love Christmas to listen to stories that inspire the happiest of seasons. And no story is as compelling as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, penned in 1843. But what inspired the Carol? What triggered Dickens' imagination to write a story so unlike anything he had written before - a story about Christmas, wrought with flashbacks and flash-forwards and infused with the supernatural? In Eben Kruge, Richard Barlow Adams delivers a pause-resisting narrative that weaves fact and fiction for a penetrating look inside the life and psyche of Dickens when he and wife Catherine traveled to America in 1842 at the invitation of Washington Irving.

Thirty years old and already world famous, he visits nearly two dozen cities, from Richmond to St. Louis to Quebec. At the end of his five-month trip, exhausted, overly vetted, and less than enamored with the new nation, he makes a final stop at the United States Military Academy north of New York City. For the first time facing writer's block, Dickens learns of the man Eben Kruge, an attorney who resides in Cornwall and whose "black turned to white" quite literally overnight. Declaring he must meet the man and know his story, he strikes out for Cornwall early the next morning, oblivious to what lies ahead and risking the secret he intended to take to his grave.