Now a major motion picture from Paramount and Universal Pictures International. The #1 national bestseller. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and the ABBY Award. "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 -- exasperating; irresponsible and beguiling -- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain; who saved Ireland; and of the Angel on the Seventh Step; who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers; begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire; 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. Angela's Ashes; imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion; is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.