Frank McCourt
Angela's Ashes

"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 luminous 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 does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.  

Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, 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.

Frank McCourt
'Tis

Angela's Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt's critically-acclaimed, lyrical memoir of his Irish-American childhood won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Award. 'Tis is the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant without a formal education, to brilliant raconteur and schoolteacher.