After a hugely successful debut novel, Stewart Paylor is supposed to be delivering chapters of his new book. Unbeknownst to everyone around him, including Cynthia, his literary agent/girlfriend, Stewart has writer’s block and has not written a word. His life goes even further astray when he returns home from a vacation to find a homeless mother, Cassandra, and her two children, 12-year old Jake and 9-year old Vera have been squatting in his house, with nowhere to go.
In 1843, despite the fact that Dickens is a successful writer, the failure of his latest book puts his career at a crossroads, until the moment when, struggling with inspiration and confronting reality with his childhood memories, a new character is born in the depths of his troubled mind; an old, lonely, embittered man, so vivid, so human, that a whole world grows around him, a story so inspiring that changed the meaning of Christmas forever.