Before he became the ghost who warned Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley was a man with ambitions, losses, and a conscience he learned to silence.

In Jacob Marley: A Ghost’s Redemption, Alan N. Webber reimagines the life behind one of the most memorable spirits in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Told largely in Marley’s own wry, confessional voice, this historical Christmas novella follows his journey from the streets of Birmingham to the counting houses of London, where a gift for numbers offers an escape from poverty.

A generous mentor gives Jacob his first real chance. Marriage and fatherhood promise a happiness he has never known. But grief drives him deeper into business, and the arrival of a brilliant, fiercely ambitious accountant named Ebenezer Scrooge changes the course of his life. Their partnership brings prosperity. It also exposes the dangerous distance between making money and caring for the people whose lives depend on it.