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..." Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and in Ireland in the 40s. It is a story of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums -- too many children, too little money, his mother Angela barely coping as his father Malachy's drinking bouts constantly brought the family to the brink of disaster. It is a story of courage and survival against apparently overwhelming odds. Written with the vitality and resonance of a work of fiction, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality, Angela's Ashes is imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's distinctive humour and compassion. Out of terrible circumstances, he has created a glorious book in the tradition of Ireland's literary masters, which bears all the marks of a great classic.
Accolades
Winner of Whitaker Platinum Book Award 2001.
Winner of Best of the Bestsellers 1998.
Winner of Pulitzer Prize Biography Category 1997.
Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Biography 1997.
Winner of Royal Society of Literature Award 1996.
Author Biography
frank mccourt has published just one book, Angela's Ashes. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; it has sold 1.5 million copies in its Flamingo editions alone and tens of millions worldwide. For thirty years he taught in NYC schools, before, in his 60s, settling down to write his story.
