A Childhood Memoir

I'll Tell Me Ma

A touching, moving memoir of boyhood by the author of the bestseller An Evil Cradling.

Spirited, thoughtful, sensitive and robust ... this book is written with great discernment and aplomb

Keenan has acheived razor-sharp recall of seminal incidents in a childhood that was extraordinarily insightful. Searingly honest. Eloquent

What distinguishes this account is the writing

His story...is affectionally recalled from darkness to light

Brian Keenan was born in Belfast in 1951. An Evil Cradling is the story of his four years' captivity in Beirut and is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of the novel, Turlough and two travel books, Between Extremes (with John McCarthy) and Four Quarters Of Light. He lives with his family outside Dublin.

Local rather than international, the dramas and privations described in this memoir are not the stuff of headlines. This is the story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast after the war; an ordinary boy who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment and survival that was An Evil Cradling. 
 
Brian Keenan has captured the vanished world of 1950s Belfast in all its vivid vernacular and grey, post-war austerity. I'll Tell Me Ma is an affectionate story of a disaffected childhood. At the centre is a shy, self-conscious boy of unusual moral integrity; a boy puzzled by religion and sectarianism, in love with books and music and full of curiosity about the world outside. It is also a book about coming-to-terms with the past: a resounding, thrilling record of redemption.

Four Quarters Of Light

'A superb travel book...deeply spiritual'

'An excellent travelogue...full of one-off characters vividly brought to life...an engaging and articulate book that does much to illuminate America's Last Frontier'

'Wonderfully evocative and at times quite extraordinarily moving. There are many moments you carry with you long after you've turned the last page. Magic'

'Combines a Bill Bryson like directness with an intimate soul searching agenda, reminiscent in places of the introspective insights that made An Evil Cradling so memorable'

Brian Keenan is a writer and poet. An Evil Cradling, the story of his four years' captivity in Beirut, is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of a travel book, Between Extremes, with John McCarthy, and a novel, Turlough.

Brian Keenan's fascination with Alaska began as a small boy while reading Jack London's wondrous Call of the Wild. With a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape and a heart informed by his love of desolate and barren places, Brian Keenan sets out for Alaska to discover its four geographical quarters from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, and en route, finds a land as fantastical as a fairytale but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure... 
From dog-mushing on a frozen lake beneath the whirling colours of the aurora borealis to camping in a two dollar tent in the tundra of the arctic circle, Brian Keenan seeks out the ultimate wilderness experience and along the way, encounters hard-core survivalists who know what struggle and endurance mean from their daily battle with nature to exist.He discovers that true wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a place.And ultimately to make Alaska home, one must surrender to the land.

Between Extremes

A moving and funny testament to a friendship born out of adversity.

'One of the funniest and most moving testaments to friendship that one is likely to read'

'Such an absorbing subject, so deeply and warmly expressed'

'The best travel book I've read so far this year'

'They take us every step of the way with a wonderfully infectious joie de vivre'

'Such a vivid and inspiring odyssey that captivated readers will be spurred into booking flights to Chile...Fun glows from every page even in wretched times'

'A superb travel book, an amalgam of McCarthy's effortless, laconic style, and Keenan's agonised, brilliantly evocative writing'

Biography for John McCarthy 
 
As a journalist in television news John McCarthy was sent on his first foreign assignment to Beirut in 1986 aged twenty-nine. His career was abruptly cut short by militiamen who kidnapped and held him captive for five and half years. 
 
Since his release he has written four books - Some Other Rainbow (with Jill Morrell), about his hostage years, Island Race (with Sandi Toksvig), an account of their circumnavigation of Britain, and Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), a journey through Chile and his latest, A Ghost Upon Your Path. 
 
John McCarthy continues to work in both radio and television. 
 
Biography for Brian Keenan</b 
 
Brian Keenan is a writer and poet. AN EVIL CRADLING is the story of his four years' captivity in Beirut and is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of a travel book, BETWEEN EXTREMES with John McCarthy, and a novel, TULLOUGH.

In 1986 Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were forced to take a journey without maps. For the next four years they were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. From the blank outlook of a tiny cell, with only each other and a few volumes of an ancient American encyclopaedia to sustain them, they could only wander the wide open spaces of their imagination. To displace the ugly confines of their existence, they envisaged walking in the High Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia. 
 
Five years after their return Brian and John chose to travel together again to see how the reality of Chile matched their imagination and to revisit their past experiences. They journeyed by every means available through vast empty deserts, verdant plains and barren tundra. Between Extremes is the story of that journey which once more found them far from home, in an unfamiliar landscape, but which for the first time allowed them to live by their own rules.

An Evil Cradling

'A moving and remarkable triumph' Sebastian Faulks, Independent on Sunday

An early nineties classic... It reminds you of the privilege of freedom

There may have been more important books than Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling, but its thoughtfulness and delicacy of feeling are unforgettable. Four years of savage captivity in Lebanon have been transmuted into understanding, not bitterness: a remarkable achievement

From the horror has come something wonderful. An Evil Cradling is a great book... it has been created from harsh reality, and it has been created by a true writer... With the publication of An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan is not letting the world forget. This is a mighty achievement by a magnificent writer

Scriptural in its resonances and its broad artistry, while being as gripping as an airport thriller

Brian Keenan was born in Belfast in 1951. An Evil Cradling is the story of his four years' captivity in Beirut and is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of the novel, Turlough and two travel books, Between Extremes (with John McCarthy) and Four Quarters Of Light. He lives with his family outside Dublin.

Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years. For much of that time he was shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and, later, his fellow hostages, amongst them John McCarthy.

Brian Keenan

Keenan evokes a spiritual beauty from the story of this rapt dreamer, haunted and compelled by visitations

While held hostage by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen in the suburbs of Beirut, Brian Keenan was visited and sustained by the presence of Turlough O'Carolan - the legendary blind Irish harper of the seventeenth century. This novel is thus a re-creation of an extraordinary historical story and a personal debt repaid. It is also, obliquely, a parallel life - another life imprisoned, shaped by the dark.Narrated largely by O'Carolan from his death-bed, and through the recollections of those closest to him, Turlough powerfully brings to life a lost Ireland of famine and disease, eviction and oppression. Stalking through the broken and dispossessed comes Turlough O'Carolan, the musical prodigy, blinded by smallpox and now an itinerant harper, lauded by the aristocracy and a hero to his people. His Rabelaisian desire for drink and women is counterpointed by his artistic struggle towards the great music and some kind of inner peace. Driven by demons and dreams, riven by contradictions, Turlough emerges as a great man, full of frailty: a blind man afraid of the dark.A panoramic picaresque, rich with the textures and smells of rural Ireland and peopled by a host of angels and devils, Turlough is a remarkable historical journey, and a huge imaginative feat

Brian Keenan

Praise for Turlough

Keenan evokes a spiritual beauty from the story of this rapt dreamer, haunted and compelled by visitations

Imaginative and lovingly executed

A magnificent writer

Keenan evokes a spiritual beauty from the story of this rapt dreamer, haunted and compelled by visitations

Imaginative and lovingly executed

A magnificent writer

Keenan evokes a spiritual beauty from the story of this rapt dreamer, haunted and compelled by visitations

Imaginative and lovingly executed

A magnificent writer

Books by Brian Keenan

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