Michael Harding – författare

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On frosty nights, as he sits by a flickering fire, Michael Harding withdraws into the stillness of winter and begins to reckon with age and death.As stories emerge from the shadows, we meet a young boy whose arrival brings hope, but whose journey will know winter's path. November is a rainstorm, December a bleak twilight, but as January dawns and the icethaws, the fragile light of love penetrates the dark, bringing beauty to the earth and making new beginnings possible.In writing of shadowed beauty, Midwinter is a poignant exploration of a season of loss, and the glimpses of hope that can follow even the longest nights.Snow falls within.Blanketing the heart in peace.Winter's dream takes hold. This book is dedicated to everyone at Pieta House, a suicide prevention charity. This is a work of non-fiction apart from the character of Martin who is fictional but whose story reflects the heartache and loss so many families endure every year.

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 started out as a book about depression. And then became a story about growing old, the essence of love and marriage - and sitting in cars, staring at lakes.

'A compelling memoir. Absorbing and graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, [Hanging with the Elephant] is clever and brilliantly pieced together. Harding writes like an angel' Sunday TimesFrom the No.1 bestselling author of Staring at Lakes, Talking to Strangers and On Tuesdays I'm A Buddhist'In public or on stage, it's different. I'm fine. I have no bother talking to three hundred people, and sharing my feelings. But when I'm in a room on a one-to-one basis, I get lost. I can never find the right word. Except for that phrase - hold me.'Michael Harding's wife has departed for a six-week trip, and he has been left alone in their home in Leitrim. Faced with the realities of caring for himself for the first time since his illness two years before, Harding endeavours to tame the 'elephant' - an Asian metaphor for the unruly mind. As he does, he finds himself finally coming to terms with the death of his mother - a loss that has changed him more than he knows.Funny, searingly honest and profound, Hanging with the Elephant pulls back the curtain and reveals what it is really like to be alive.

'Searingly honest, funny, self-deprecating, Harding's narrative seems to rest on the pulse of Ireland' Irish TimesOne day in the summer of 2016, Michael Harding's wife brought an unusual gift home from Warsaw. All of a sudden, he found himself falling back into the old religious devotions of an earlier time. The meaning he had found through years of engagement with therapy began to dissolve.Here, in On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist, Harding examines the search for meaning in life which keeps him fastened to the idea of god.After many therapy sessions focused on an effort to uncover personal truth, and long solitary months on the road with a one man show, Harding is finally led to an artists' retreat in the shadow of Skellig Michael.Mixing stories from the road with dispatches from his Irish Times columns, On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist is a spell-binding and powerful book about the human condition, the narratives we weave around the self, and the ultimate bliss of living in the present moment.'What happens between one story and the next? That's the really interesting part. That's the space where we find bliss; where we float sometimes, suspended, and only for a brief moment. Perhaps only for a few scarce moments in an entire life.'

'Harding writes like an angel' Sunday TimesTalking to Strangers, from the No.1 bestselling author of Staring at Lakes, Hanging with the Elephant and On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist is a book about love, about the stories we share with others, and the stories we leave behind us.Too much wine and a casual browse of an airline website - this is how Michael Harding found himself in a strange flat in Bucharest in early January, which set the tone for the rest of that year.After an intense stint in a high-profile production of The Field, Harding returned to the tranquil hills above Lough Allen and started to plan some dramatic changes to his little cottage. Surely an extension would give him a renewed sense of purpose in life as he approached old age.But as the walls of his home crumbled, so too did his mental health, and he fell, once again, into depression -- that great darkness where life feels like nothing more than a waste of time.And yet, it is in that great darkness that we discover what really makes us human.'Michael Harding is no ordinary man or memoirist ... a book that champions the kindness (or at least company) of strangers as essential for that elusive state known as happiness' RTÉ Guide

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

In late 2018, Michael Harding was in a hotel room in Blanchardstown experiencing severe pains in his chest. He eventually phoned an ambulance and was admitted to hospital, suffering from an acute heart attack. Here, in Chest Pain, he looks at the months before the heart attack when he kept the signs of failing health from his beloved and instead retreated into solitude -- and with his own inimitable style and humour takes us with him through the months after a stent had been inserted in his heart, where he travels the roads of Donegal in a camper van in a journey back to the beloved, and to himself.Chest Pain is a thought-provoking, spell-binding memoir about togetherness and what it means to be alive.

'In these strange days Michael Harding's route taking and wise words gently nudge us towards the future, steadying us as we navigate the great unknowns ahead' Joe Duffy The bestselling new book from acclaimed writer and Irish Times columnist. It's dawn and in the early morning light, Michael Harding is walking in his garden in the hills above Lough Allen in Leitrim, dreaming of the new beginning in Donegal he had planned before the world changed in the early months of 2020. Here, in his stunning and intimate new book, we travel with Michael through this day as he looks back at a life lived within, and as part of, the Irish landscape. In doing so, he vividly brings to life what is at the heart of Irish identity: storytelling, love and human connection. With honesty, insight and tenderness, he shows that while everything has changed, that which is important remains the same; and how, in this new world, we can live with hope and faith in everything that is beautiful in the sky. What is Beautiful in the Sky is an account of our times: a record of our past and a promise of new beginnings. 'This morning is special. The air is cleaner than it used to be. Birds sing with a deeper resonance. The apple trees shed their petals and fatten their fruit with an astonishing defiance; as if nature itself carried a coded message; everything will be OK in the end. Hope may seem lost with each new death but love has become more visible in every hospital corridor in the world."Let's begin again."

NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER'A beautiful book of great tenderness, love of life, and wisdom' JOSEPH O'CONNORFor almost fifty years, Michael Harding has been crafting words in a bid to express himself and to explore truths about the human condition. But even still he found himself unable to say certain things he really wanted to. Then, while in recovery from surgery, he travelled to a cottage on the Atlantic coast and thought again about life and the people who had profoundly affected him over the years: mentors, loves and old friends.There at the ocean he wrote letters, with an intimacy not previously risked. Letters that would never be posted but that appear now in All the Things Left Unsaid - a vulnerable and beautifully wrought collection of insights into life, death, friendship and love.PRAISE FOR MICHAEL HARDING'S BOOKSHilarious, and tender ... and always beautifully written' Kevin Barry'Often funny, occasionally disturbing ... Harding has peeled back his soul and held it out on the palm of his hand for all to see' Christine Dwyer Hickey'It's rare for a memoir to demand such intense emotional involvement and rarer still for it to be so fully rewarded' The Sunday Times 'Searingly honest ... Harding's narrative seems to rest on the pulse of Ireland' The Irish Times

'Harding's prose style is fluid and fluent ... unflinching, merciless honesty' Sunday IndependentTo mark his 70th birthday Michael Harding travelled to Spain to walk part of the Camino de Santiago. Yet, as he set off on his pilgrimage, he found he wasn't alone. Accompanying him was the ghost of his long-dead father, a distant and aloof figure whom he lost when he was only twenty-two years old.Here, with searing honesty and beautifully wrought prose, Harding examines how this man, who had died almost half a century ago, could have had such a profound effect on the writer's life.From the Ireland of his youth, to the time of his father's death, and to the holy wells and pubs he frequented in search of a connection with a man he never really knew, I Loved Him From The Day He Died is a heartfelt examination of love, forgiveness and letting go - told with simple vulnerability and profound insight.PRAISE FOR MICHAEL HARDING'S BOOKS'Hilarious and tender ... beautifully written' Kevin Barry'A beautiful book of great tenderness, love of life, and wisdom' Joseph O'Connor'Compelling' Sunday Times

All is not as it seems in the bucolic Sussex countryside. Throw another log on the fire and listen as the mysterious Uncle Franklin tells his tales of ghosts, strange beasts, murderous Morris dancers and other bizarre characters.This entrancingly dark collection of stories set in the forests of the Weald, the lonely marshes of the Pevensey levels and the South Downs of a hundred years ago conjures up a vivid description of the Sussex countryside on the cusp of the modern age.With references to real villages and local folklore, these linked stories are interspersed with authentic Sussex recipes. Open the pages and be transported to the top of the Downs on Midsummer’s Eve, a snug cowshed in the early hours of Christmas morning, or to a Maypole dance in a beautiful village... but what will happen next?