Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt’s memoir recounts his childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the 1930s and 40s. Born to recent Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, McCourt was raised in a household defined by crushing poverty, a mother’s desperate struggle to feed the family, and a father who rarely worked and often drank his wages. Despite the misery of their existence—begging for food, gathering coal from the roadside, and enduring the casual cruelty of neighbors—McCourt survives through the power of story. His father, exasperating and irresponsible yet beguiling, nurtures in him an appetite for tales of Cuchulain and the Angel on the Seventh Step, which become the lens through which he interprets his own life.

Description adapted from Open Library ↗.