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Flickering
Sometimes the most precious gifts come wrapped in the most unexpected packages.
In the week leading up to Christmas 1996, three souls find themselves at the end of hope. Callum, a widowed professor haunted by loss, has given up on the season that once brought him joy. James, a nineteen-year-old with nowhere to turn, faces his first Christmas cast out and alone. Anders, trying to rebuild after his family's betrayal, wonders if he'll ever truly belong anywhere again.
But when a fierce winter storm brings them together on one December night, they discover something none of them that the greatest gifts aren't found under trees, but in the courage to open your heart to strangers who become family.
Set in historic Old Louisville during the holiday season, this is a different kind of Christmas story—one about the magic that happens when broken people choose to heal together, when hope is passed from one person to another like a carefully tended flame, and when love proves that it can take many the love between partners, the love of chosen family, and the love that says "you are not alone" to those who need to hear it most.
Like the classic tales of Christmas past, this is a story about transformation, sacrifice, and the profound truth that sometimes what we think we're giving away is exactly what saves us.
A modern Christmas story about the gifts that matter most—and the families we choose when the ones we're born into fail us.
In the week leading up to Christmas 1996, three souls find themselves at the end of hope. Callum, a widowed professor haunted by loss, has given up on the season that once brought him joy. James, a nineteen-year-old with nowhere to turn, faces his first Christmas cast out and alone. Anders, trying to rebuild after his family's betrayal, wonders if he'll ever truly belong anywhere again.
But when a fierce winter storm brings them together on one December night, they discover something none of them that the greatest gifts aren't found under trees, but in the courage to open your heart to strangers who become family.
Set in historic Old Louisville during the holiday season, this is a different kind of Christmas story—one about the magic that happens when broken people choose to heal together, when hope is passed from one person to another like a carefully tended flame, and when love proves that it can take many the love between partners, the love of chosen family, and the love that says "you are not alone" to those who need to hear it most.
Like the classic tales of Christmas past, this is a story about transformation, sacrifice, and the profound truth that sometimes what we think we're giving away is exactly what saves us.
A modern Christmas story about the gifts that matter most—and the families we choose when the ones we're born into fail us.
212 pages, Hardcover
Published October 23, 2025
About the author
Michael Manosca
24 books9 followersMichael Manosca writes about the people others are uneasy mentioning — the ones who are gay, or don't quite fit, or carry some small difference that makes a stranger smile and keep walking. He writes them because he has been one of them, and because somewhere along the way he learned the truth his books keep circling back to: family is not always the people you are born to. It is whoever steps up and says I want you here.
Every novel he has written grows from someone real — a friend, a stranger, a version of himself, a man he loved. He doesn't write to be an author. He writes so that one person, somewhere, might open a book and find themselves inside it — and understand that for all the ways we talk ourselves into being alone, almost none of us truly wants to be.
He came to fiction by way of the arts, studying in Chicago, and it shows in how he builds a scene: visually, patiently, trusting a small gesture to carry the weight. He lives along the western coast of the United States and has written more than a dozen novels, with another always underway.
Every novel he has written grows from someone real — a friend, a stranger, a version of himself, a man he loved. He doesn't write to be an author. He writes so that one person, somewhere, might open a book and find themselves inside it — and understand that for all the ways we talk ourselves into being alone, almost none of us truly wants to be.
He came to fiction by way of the arts, studying in Chicago, and it shows in how he builds a scene: visually, patiently, trusting a small gesture to carry the weight. He lives along the western coast of the United States and has written more than a dozen novels, with another always underway.
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