Top

We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

Hanging with the Elephant

On sale

6th October 2014

Price: £13.99

Select a format

Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781444783131

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

In his new book, Hanging with the Elephant, writer Michael Harding is back in Leitrim in the north-west of Ireland. His wife has left for a six-week trip to Poland and he is alone for the first time since his illness two years earlier. Faced with this time on his own, Harding resolves to examine the threat of depression that is a constant presence in his life and his dependency on his wife, the beloved, since his illness. But, as he attempts to tame the ‘elephant’ – an Asian metaphor for the unruly mind – he finds himself drawn back to the death of his mother during the summer of 2012.
Written with unflinching honesty, Hanging with the Elephant begins as one man’s quest to overcome his demons, but becomes a journey into the depths of the soul, where we are given a glimpse of the one thing that holds us all.

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

Sunday Times
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
Mary McEvoy, Irish Independent
The writing is simple...The detail is forensic. The smells, the sounds and the memories of the house and its chatelaine described beautifully and without embellishment, one word following another, perfectly judged and placed, like literary feng shui
John Boyne, Irish Times
Wonderful ... Like many people who have achieved a great deal, [Harding] cannot recognise his triumphs. This book, like its predecessor, is one of them.
Metro Herald
Harding is a self-deprecating and winsome writer whose bittersweet musings on middle-age, loneliness and the search for spiritual enlightenment in post-Catholic Ireland are leavened by an incredibly dry and unforced wit. However, it's the sections in which Harding focuses on his relationship with his mother...that Hanging with the Elephant reaches lump-in-throat-inducing levels of poignancy
RTE Guide
Harding hits it out of the park again