Washburn University’s Tom Averill, an O. Henry Award winner, discusses his inventive new novel, which subtly evokes Charles Dickens’ Christmastime classic in telling the story of a small-college librarian in Topeka, Kansas, who’s fascinated by transition – among other things, from the Victorian age to the modern age. Her life, incidentally, is going through major change.

Averill is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Washburn, and has written three other novels: rode, Secrets of the Tsil Café, and The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson. He spoke at the Library in September 2013 as part of its Big Read initiative focusing on the classic Western novel True Grit.