Angela's Ashes
Imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion. This is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. 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."
So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy — exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling — does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors — yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
- Author
- Frank McCourt
- Format
- paperback
- Pages
- 452
- Series
- Frank McCourt
- Publisher
- Harper Perennial
- Language
- english
- ISBN
- 9780007205233
- Characters
- Frank McCourt
- Settings
- Limerick, New York State, Ireland
- Genres
- memoir, biography, classics, ireland, autobiography, history, historical
- Release date
- 2005
- Search 9780007205233 on Amazon
- Search 9780007205233 on Goodreads
- A Life in Frocks
- Everything in the Garden
- William Shakespeare's
- The Tapestried Chamber; Or, the Lady in the Sacque
- The Crafting of Narnia
- Off On Our Own: Living Off-Grid in Comfortable Independence
- Mistress to an Age
- How the Whale Got His Throat
- The Nikola Tesla Treasury
- The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses