Angela's Ashes

McCourt,Frank

ISBN 10: 0002254433 / ISBN 13: 9780002254434

Published by Harper Collins, London, 1996

About this Item

This is a Near Fine Copy of this Book in a Near Fine Dust-Jacket,not price clipped with no chips or tears to the dust-jacket,some slight tanning to page edges of the book,becoming increasingly difficult to acquire,one small inscription to the ffep,8vo 363pp First Edition. Seller Inventory # 9867

Bibliographic Details

Title: Angela's Ashes

Publisher: Harper Collins, London

Publication Date: 1996

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Edition: First Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

Review:

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so great back in the old country either--not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting clichés about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty, and frequent death and illness, and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all the makings of a compelling memoir.