Angela's Ashes (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Stunning reissue of the phenomenal worldwide bestseller: Frank McCourt’s sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and in Ireland in the 40s. 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 Pulitzer Prize for Biography 1997. Winner of Royal Society of Literature Award 1996. Winner of Whitaker Platinum Book Award 2001. Author Biography Frank McCourt’s first book, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it has sold 1.3 million copies in its Flamingo editions alone and tens of millions world-wide. For many years a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School, McCourt performed with his brother Malachy in a musical review about their Irish youth. He lives in New York.

1. Critical Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews US A powerful, exquisitely written debut, a recollection of the author’s miserable childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the Depression and WW II. McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 but returned to Ireland with his family at the age of four. He describes, not without humor, scenes of hunger, illness, filth, and deprivation that would have given Dickens pause. His “shiftless loquacious alcoholic father,” Malachy, rarely worked; when he did he usually drank his wages, leaving his wife, Angela, to beg from local churches and charity organizations. McCourt remembers his little sister dying in his mother’s arms. Then Oliver, one of the twins, got sick and died. McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. As awful and neglectful as his father could be, there were also heartrendingly tender moments: Unable to pay for a doctor and fearful of losing yet another child when the youngest is almost suffocating from a cold, his father places “his mouth on the little nose . . . sucking the bad stuff out of Michael’s head.” Malachy fled to do war work in England but failed to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They stole and begged and tore wood from the walls to burn in the stove. Forced to move in with an abusive cousin, McCourt became aware that the man and his mother were having “the excitement” up there in their grubby loft. After taking a beating from the man, McCourt ran away to stay with an uncle and spent his teens alternating between petty crime and odd jobs. Eventually he made his way, once again, to America. An extraordinary work in every way. McCourt magically retrieves love, dignity, and humor from a childhood of hunger, loss, and pain. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Biography

Frank McCourt’s first book, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it has sold 1.3 million copies in its Flamingo editions alone and tens of millions world-wide. For many years a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School, McCourt performed with his brother Malachy in a musical review about their Irish youth. He lives in New York.