Eternal City

A moving story of hope for all those who have ever lost someone they loved.

When Finn Chambers gets a dream assignment to fly to Rome, taking his beautiful girlfriend along to shoot Shelley’s tomb for a magazine cover, he feels he has it all. Life is good. Life really doesn’t get much better.But life can change in a second, and so it does for Finn, fashion-conscious twenty-eight-year-old hipster aiming for the stars. One careless decision at the cimitero acattolico in the eternal city of Rome, finds him falling headfirst onto Shelley’s tomb.

To his surprise Finn discovers that life doesn’t end with death, as he finds himself in a beautiful afterlife surrounded by long-dead poets, artists, and a host of fascinating characters from around the world, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, delightful Lady Mary von Haas, excommunicated Mexican priest Father Bernabe Sanchez, and August Riedel, famed German master painter.

A new world opens to Finn, who, never having had to consider much in his worldly life, has his generation’s values and hypocrisies scrutinised, and his principles and beliefs tested. At times uncomfortable truths require honest assessment when the 21 st century’s lust for celebrity, drugs, and fifteen minutes of fame, is questioned by others from centuries past. The ultimate challenge for Finn is a universal question to the living. Is the afterlife simply a dream, or imagination, the continuation of energy, or the creation of God?

His new life finds much in common with his previous life however, with humour, irreverence, the draw of sex, art, beauty, and a love of others all of significance still. For Finn Chambers there is life after death. 

Raised in Stockton-on-Tees, England, Mark Thompson is the internationally published author of Dust, published by RedDoor in the United Kingdom, translated into German and published in German as El Greco Und Ich by Mare Verlag, as El Greco Und Ich German audiobook by Parlando Verlag, and in Chinese as Dust by Donmei Publishing, Taiwan. The author spent many years living in London before moving to Andalucia in southern Spain. He has travelled extensively throughout the United States and several other countries over many years, harvesting material for writing both literature and songs. He plays guitar in a rock band, and now lives happily in York, England, with his partner Liz, two rabbits and a tortoise.