A Memory

A Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller from The New York Times, "Angela's Ashes" is Frank McCourt's masterful memoir about his childhood in Ireland.

"When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I ever survived. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Thus begins the radiant memoir of Frank McCourt, who was born during the Depression in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents and grew up in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children, as Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does, he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy – frustrating, irresponsible, and charming – ignites in Frank the hunger for the one thing he can offer: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the angel on the seventh step who brings babies to his mother.

Perhaps it is the story that is responsible for Frank's survival. In rags as diapers, begging for a pig's head for the Christmas dinner, and collecting coal from the street to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, fasting, and the everyday cruelty of relatives and neighbors – and lives to tell his story with eloquence, enthusiasm, and remarkable forgiveness.

"Angela's Ashes," infused with Frank McCourt's astonishing humor and compassion on every page, is a glorious book that bears all the hallmarks of a classic.