Running After Maria

Running After Maria

a novel by

Edmund J Gubbins

This is the story of one man’s descent into depression after tragedy strikes, his anger at other people trying to help and his redemption in the arms of somebody who admired the dedication of other people who try to help. It explores the question of whether a person can really be saved after a devastating loss especially of somebody that person loves deeply? Does not their world and the will to live end?

James Ashleigh went to sea after leaving school and began to live what turned out to be, for him, the ideal life. Plenty of money, plenty of women and drink and visiting places only read about in books. The ideal life for somebody in their mid twenties with nothing to hold them in one place. Then one day at a party on one of ship on which he was an officer, in port in Finland, he meets Maria and life's complications start. After several voyages from London to Helsinki when he stayed in her flat making love and to concerts, he asks Maria to marry him but he is devastated when she refuses. Though she says she loves him and still wants him to come to her flat,  it is his Englishness which prevents her from saying yes. She will not marry him if this means leaving Finland. Though angry and bewildered, James lets their relationship drift on. One summer when James has been taken to see maria's parents, Maria announces she is pregnant and in due course has her baby. This changes her attitude but just as she is becoming reconciled to leaving Finland with James, she is killed in a car crash in which James is also badly injured. James is devastated when he recovers, first at not being at Maria's funeral and then because of the fates that befall him. He takes to drinking, forsakes his son, rapes his best friends wife and hides away on a small coastal tanker still drinking heavily. After sex with the Captains fourteen year old daughter which brings home to James how low he has sunk, James leaves to go to college. College is the same, drinking, sex and hardly any studying. On an off chance one night he is introduced to Henri and suddenly over dinner bares his soul to her about Maria, what Maria meant and his lost son. At last his running after the ghost of Maria is laid to rest and he arranges to meet his son and Maria's mother.

NOW AVAILABLE as and ebook for download from www.smashwords.com
under my full name
Edmund Gubbins.