An Evil Cradling recounts Brian Keenan’s four-and-a-half years as a hostage in Beirut in the 1980s. 

Held in darkness, often chained, Keenan survives through imagination — reciting poetry, reconstructing landscapes, building mental conversations. The body is confined; the mind refuses to be.

A book about how identity thins, bends, and sometimes sharpens when everything external is stripped away.

A powerful memoir of captivity written in the late twentieth century.