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Staring at Lakes: A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking

Michael Harding

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Throughout his life, Michael Harding has lived with a sense of emptiness - through faith, marriage, fatherhood and his career as a writer, a pervading sense of darkness and unease remained.

When he was fifty-eight, he became physically ill and found himself in the grip of a deep melancholy. Here, in this beautifully written memoir, he talks with openness and honesty about his journey: leaving the priesthood when he was in his thirties, settling in Leitrim with his artist wife, the depression that eventually overwhelmed him, and how, ultimately, he found a way out of the dark, by accepting the fragility of love and the importance of now.

STARING AT LAKES was a number one bestseller in Michael's native Ireland and won three BGE Irish book awards in 2013, including Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

'It's rare for a memoir to demand such intense emotional involvement and rarer still for it to be so fully rewarded' - SUNDAY TIMES.

'Staring at Lakes is a raw and honest account of a life in depression. Harding's writing, which is rich and lyrical, is especially astute when describing the pain of living with an illness that has the ability to suck the joy out of any occasion.' - DAILY EXPRESS

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Michael Harding

Michael Harding

Michael Harding is an author and playwright. A recipient of the Stewart Parker Award for theatre, a Hennessy Award for Short Stories and a Bank of Ireland/RTA award for Excellence in the Arts in 1990, he has written numerous plays for the Abbey Theatre and was writer in association with the National Theatre in 1993.

His novels include Bird in the Snow, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion and Priest. He is also the author of several bestselling memoirs including Staring at Lakes (winner of the Bord GA is Energy Book of the Year award), Hanging with the Elephant, Talking to Strangers, On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist, Chest Pain and What is Beautiful in the Sky.

He is a member of AosdA na, a columnist for over fifteen years with The Irish Times and his podcasts are available on the Patreon platform.

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