Have you ever done something you knew was a bad idea, but you just had to do it anyway? I’m Merry Bingham and that’s exactly how I felt when I climbed on to the roof of my Victorian house to put up my vintage Rudolph the Reindeer sleigh set.

Yes, I know I’m 55-years-old and I’m supposed to be sensible. I’m a wife and mother of three grown children and I make my living as a book scout, which is to say people hire me to find rare books for them. I own a rare book myself, which is a seventh edition of A Christmas Carol, autographed by Charles Dickens for one of my ancestors. Very valuable. The last thing I should be doing is climbing around my roof in the winter. And yet I love it so: the wind off the Hudson River, the stars, and the excitement that I feel every year as I get ready for Christmas. Or the excitement I used to feel. Or want to feel.

So I fell off the roof.

Thankfully I didn’t break anything, but in doing the X-rays, the doctors found a nodule in my lung. How scary is that? My dog Leroy, who talks to me, sometimes, tells me I’m brave and I can handle this, and I think he’s right, but it’s not me I’m worrying about. It’s my kids. Yes, they’re adults, in their thirties, but they seem so lost to me.

There’s handsome Nick, who runs an adventure tour company in Oregon, but has closed himself off from any emotional attachments since he survived an accident a long time ago. My daughter Bessie is a classic middle child. She wants to be an actress, which means she’s unemployed. Drifting. Then there’s my youngest, Song Lee, who we adopted from Korea when she was two. She’s always been the most driven of my kids. But I just found out she was fired from her impressive job for plagiarizing.

If I could only get them all to London. I feel like London is the source of all Christmas magic and a family trip there might bring joy to all of us. But I don’t have the money and I’m not sure I have the strength. All I know for sure is that I’m stubborn and I won’t surrender my family or Christmas without a fight.

Merry
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Release: September 2025
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

A mother’s valiant efforts to bring her family the joy of Christmas go haywire when she finds herself haunted by the angry ghost of Charles Dickens.

This sparkling, cozy novel is perfect for readers of Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow and anyone who looks forward to watching It’s a Wonderful Life each December!

Merry Bingham used to love Christmas—until she started worrying all the time about family, money, and death. The only thing that continues to bring her joy is reading from her heirloom edition of A Christmas Carol, autographed by Charles Dickens himself and passed down through five generations of her family. Now, as she waits for the results of the medical tests that will tell her whether this Christmas season will be her last, Merry prepares to give her book to the next generation. Except none of her three children wants it.

Merry refuses to surrender Christmas or Dickens without a fight, so she sells the book and uses the money to take her family to London. She will fill them with Christmas joy even if she has to cram it down their throats.

But the harder Merry pushes, the worse everything gets. Her children erupt into vicious arguments, her gentle husband stops talking to her, her deluxe rental apartment is not what was promised. Oh, and she keeps seeing the ghost of Charles Dickens around town—and he is not happy with her.

Fans of family stories, classic literature, Christmas novels, and holiday season magic will adore Merry.

About the author
Susan Breen is the award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series. She teaches novel writing at Gotham Writers and has been on the faculty of conferences from Cape Cod to Dubai. She loves stories about families, London, ghosts, guilt, atonement, dogs, Charles Dickens and Christmas. She likes the idea of collecting rare books, though so far she’s only collected two, both of them being early editions of A Christmas Carol.