Angela's Ashes is the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. 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 neighbours - yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Frank McCourt has written a literary masterpiece that warms the heart as easily as it breaks it.