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