
Staring at Lakes
A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking
Michael Harding(Author)
Yellow Kite (Publisher)
Published on 9. March 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-1-4736-2731-4 (ISBN)
Description
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
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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Hodder & Stoughton
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
224 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4736-2731-4 (9781473627314)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
03/2016
1st Edition
Hodder & Stoughton
€3.99
Available for download
Person
Michael Harding is an author and a playwright. His creative chronicle of ordinary life in the Irish midlands is published as a weekly column in The Irish Times. He has published three novels, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion and Bird in the Snow.