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

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 58, 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 30s, 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 best seller in Michael's native Ireland and won three BGE Irish book awards in 2013, including Non-Fiction Book of the Year.