“Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale."

The late Frank McCourt finally broke through as an author only in the later years of his life, and unfortunately his time as a recognized author did not even last for 15 years, before he died of cancer in 2009, nonetheless he managed to leave his mark as an accomplished writer.

McCourt's great break through was published in 1996, and it would become one of his most famous books. In Angela's Ashes, he reveals the story of his upbringing in the slum of Ireland. His story of growing up in Limerick under unbearable circumstances is not only captivating but also painfully real. It portrays severe poverty, alcoholism, disease and death; and above all it describes the uncompromising pride of the Irish. Angela's Ashes is just one of those books that hatches on and refuses to let go.

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived 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.
. . . nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years."

                                                                                                          -Frank McCourt