In this remarkable book, Professor Diego De Leo, distinguished Italian psychiatrist and world leading researcher into suicide prevention, takes us on a journey to the edge of reason and through into the light of salvation. We hear the voices of desperate traumatised people pushed to the limit of suicide who, via a stroke of fate, had their lives spared. We also hear from others left behind after suicide. Their personal stories told in the form of letters to Diego reveal much about the human spirit - its ability to find a way back from the darkest of places where everything seems lost.

As Diego himself explains this is not a manual on psychopathology but instead a very human look at the deep complexities of suicidal behaviour and the struggle for psychological science to understand this worst of human tragedies. While sometimes taken in a coldly rational way, the decision to commit suicide is one built out of years of living. As such, Diego allows the reader to follow each of the 12 life stories in rich personal detail, adding his own interpretations and comments as a roadmap to guide the reader on the many messages these stories reveal.