I'll Tell Me Ma

A Childhood Memoir

Brian Keenan author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:3rd Jun '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

I'll Tell Me Ma cover

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

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. a boy puzzled by religion and sectarianism, in love with books and music and full of curiosity about the world outside.

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.

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 *
Keenan has acheived razor-sharp recall of seminal incidents in a childhood that was extraordinarily insightful. Searingly honest. Eloquent * Herald *
What distinguishes this account is the writing -- Tom O'Sullivan * Financial Times *

ISBN: 9780099428152

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 20mm

Weight: 224g

320 pages