I'll Tell Me Ma
  • Published: 15 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099428152
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

I'll Tell Me Ma

A Childhood Memoir

Formats & editions
EBook
31 May 2011
Paperback
15 Jun 2010
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A touching, moving memoir of boyhood by the author of the bestseller An Evil Cradling.

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.
  • Published: 15 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099428152
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

Brian Keenan

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, two travel books, Between Extremes (with John McCarthy) and Four Quarters Of Light and his own memoir, I'll Tell Me Ma. He lives with his family outside Dublin.

Also by Brian Keenan

Four Quarters Of Light
Turlough
Between Extremes
An Evil Cradling
See all

Praise for I'll Tell Me Ma

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

Patricia Craig, Irish Times

A masterpiece of self-interrogation

Tom Adair, Scotsman

A remarkable act of literary exorcism

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

What distinguishes this account is the writing

Tom O'Sullivan, Financial Times

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

Iain Finlayson, The Times

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

Herald
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