Andy Conway's Ghosts of Christmas Past in OUTSIDELEFT

One of the UK's most prolific authors, Andy Conway has a lovely holiday surprise for us all. He jammed through the final chapters of his new novel, Ghosts of Christmas Past, working to an inhuman timeframe, with his editor to publish the new book on the 176th anniversary of the publication of Dickens' Christmas Carol. It's significant, Ghosts of Christmas Past, the 13th tome in Andy's mainly-Birmingham based Touchstone Time Travel series, is set in 1842, a year before Charles Dickens' classic Christmas tale appeared.

In Ghosts, Andy intricately interweaves facts with fiction with an outlandish jaw dropping insouciance... It’s Christmas Eve, 1842, a year before the publication of A Christmas Carol, with Dickens visiting the city on secret business, on the verge of bankruptcy and desperate for his next big literary success. In Birmingham, Dickens is about to meet three ‘ghosts’ and a host of other characters that will inspire him to write his famous Christmas book...

"I've always loved A Christmas Carol," Andy says, "Just like I’ve always loved time travel stories. And to me, it was always a time travel story just as much as it was a ghost story and a Christmas story. So I’ve been itching to tackle it somehow in my Touchstone series.”

Andy says A Christmas Carol is highly political and and as such intrinsically relevant and germane in these days that are so difficult for so many, not the few.

“Dickens wrote the Carol to deliver a sledge-hammer blow to the austerity government of Robert Peel. He was vehemently anti-Tory, even going so far as to pen anti-Tory poems, and in Scrooge he’s caricatured the archetypal Tory boss. Dickens was appalled at how Britain had lurched to the right in the 1840s and he wrote his Christmas book to remind everyone exactly what austerity was doing to working people.”

The Ghosts of Christmas Past is available in eBook format on Amazon, Kindle Unlimited and in paperback format.

Ghosts of Christmas Past