Angela's Ashes/'Tis: A Memoir of a Childhood: AND 'Tis [Hardcover]

McCourt was born in New York to Irish parents who took him back to Limerick when he was four. Subtitled 'Memoir of a Childhood', that bland description belies the richness of McCourt's recall and his ability to swim between absolute despair and moments of delightful laughter. He writes of his family's return from America to Limerick between the wars and of his mother's (the Angela of the title) growing despair at her abandonment by his feckless father. Angela's Ashes Life and death experiences of day-to-day poverty (it is hard to believe such poverty existed in Ireland as recently as the 1940s), the swings of misery and joy depending on a few pounds, and the overall optimism of the narrator, catch at your heart and make you read and read and read. For from the grimmest of material McCourt has fashioned a masterpiece that reads like a work of fiction, but has the truth of lived experience. With its harrowing background of alcoholism, starvation and infant mortality, it would be almost unbearable without his quiet, dry sense of humour. It may break your heart, but it can also make you laugh at its vividness - if for nothing else, read it for the moment when the parents leave their new-made false teeth around and their small sons try them on. His memoir has won a National Book Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and, to top it all, the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. How do you follow up a sensation like Angela's Ashes, McCourt's witty, bare-knuckled, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his impoverished Irish-American childhood? The answer is simple: write a sequel which is even better than the original. The story of the author's progress from penniless 20-year-old immigrant with rotten teeth, red, gummy eyes and no qualifications, to graduate of New York University and popular high-school teacher in 'Tis, is as compelling and every bit as good as its predecesor. His portrait of New York in the 1950s and 60s is rich in anecdote, depicting the eccentric landladies and the lost souls of the various immigrant communities, while recreating the sheer excitement of life in the optimistic New World, where everything is possible. McCourt tells his story at a cracking pace, with irrepressible humour, but also confronts his dark past - the drunken father, and the unfortunate mother, Angela, who follows him and his three brothers to New York, complaining all the way. McCourt confirms his status as a major talent - a compelling comic writer of unusual scope and compassion. (Kirkus UK)

A powerful, exquisitely written debut, a recollection of the author's miserable childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the Depression and WW II. McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 but returned to Ireland with his family at the age of four. He describes, not without humor, scenes of hunger, illness, filth, and deprivation that would have given Dickens pause. His "shiftless loquacious alcoholic father," Malachy, rarely worked; when he did he usually drank his wages, leaving his wife, Angela, to beg from local churches and charity organizations. McCourt remembers his little sister dying in his mother's arms. Then Oliver, one of the twins, got sick and died. McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. As awful and neglectful as his father could be, there were also heartrendingly tender moments: Unable to pay for a doctor and fearful of losing yet another child when the youngest is almost suffocating from a cold, his father places "his mouth on the little nose . . . sucking the bad stuff out of Michael's head." Malachy fled to do war work in England but failed to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They stole and begged and tore wood from the walls to burn in the stove. Forced to move in with an abusive cousin, McCourt became aware that the man and his mother were having "the excitement" up there in their grubby loft. After taking a beating from the man, McCourt ran away to stay with an uncle and spent his teens alternating between petty crime and odd jobs. Eventually he made his way, once again, to America. An extraordinary work in every way. McCourt magically retrieves love, dignity, and humor from a childhood of hunger, loss, and pain. (Kirkus Reviews)

A very special gift: the hardbacks of both Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis, superbly and attractively republished for this special gift edition.

’The reader of this stunning memoir can only hope that Mr McCourt will set down the story of his subsequent adventures in America in another book. Angela’s Ashes is so good it deserves a sequel.’ MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times

Angela’s Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt’s critically acclaimed, lyrical memoir of his impoverished Limerick childhood won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Award amongst others, and rapidly became a word-of-mouth bestseller topping all charts worldwide for over two years. It left readers and critics alike eager to hear more about Frank McCourt’s incredible, poignant life.

’Tis is the story of Frank’s American journey from impoverished immigrant with rotten teeth, infected eyes and no formal education to brilliant raconteur and schoolteacher. Saved first by a straying priest, then by the Democratic party, then by the United States Army, then by New York University – which admitted him on a trial basis though he had no high school diploma – Frank had the same vulnerable but invincible spirit at nineteen that he had at eight and still has today. And ‘Tis is a tale of survival as vivid, harrowing, and often hilarious as Angela’s Ashes. Yet again, it is through the power of storytelling that Frank finds a life for himself. ‘It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he’s done…McCourt proves himself one of the very best’ (Newsweek).

Here, both volumes are republished in a beautiful boxed edition, brimming with luxurious new touches, that all Frank McCourt’s many, many fans will want to own.