Angela’s Ashes

McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning look back at his childhood. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while…” “When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived 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. People everywhere brag or whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying shcoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all we were wet…” So begins Frank McCourt’s stunning memoir of his childhood in Ireland and America, a recollection of unvarnished truth and no self pity, of grinding poverty and indomitable spirit that will live in the memory long after the tape has ended. Now a major film directed by Alan Parker and starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson. Frank McCourt, the Sunday Times bestselling author, has once again proven his prowess in the genre of autobiography. His depiction of a miserable Irish Catholic childhood is a testament to his indomitable spirit and his ability to craft a bestselling book out of the most challenging circumstances. For fans of Winfried Georg Sebald (The Rings of Saturn), William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying & The Sound and The Fury), Fjodor M. Dostojewskij (The Brothers Karamazov), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), and Diane Long Hoeveler (Castle of Wolfenbach).