Times are hard for habitual guest of Her Majesty Norman Stanley Fletcher. The new prison officer, Beale, makes MacKay look soft and what’s more, an escape plan is hatching from the cell of prison godfather Grouty and Fletcher wants no part of it. The breakout is set for the day of a morale-raising football match between a ‘celebrity’ football team and the inmates of Slade. Everything is going to plan until Godber is injured on the goal post. In the ensuing confusion, Fletcher finds himself on the wrong side of the prison walls and must now try and break back into prison.

Tired of the noise and madness of New York and the crushing conventions of late Eisenhower-era America, itinerant journalist Paul Kemp travels to the pristine island of Puerto Rico to write for a local San Juan newspaper run by the downtrodden editor Lotterman. Adopting the rum-soaked lifestyle of the late ‘50s version of Hemingway’s “The Lost Generation,” Paul soon becomes entangled with a very attractive American woman, Chenaults and her fiancée Sanderson, a businessman involved in shady property development deals.  It is within this world that Kemp ultimately discovers his true voice as a writer and integrity as a man.

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.