Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt • Book 1
by Frank McCourt
Narrated by Frank McCourt
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Hearing a man narrate his own miserable Irish Catholic childhood — in his own voice — hits differently than any actor ever could.
- Great if you want: a Pulitzer-winning memoir full of dark Irish wit
- Listening experience: heavy but laced with gallows humor; emotionally cumulative
- Narration: McCourt's lilting accent carries grief and comedy at once
- Skip if: relentless childhood poverty and loss overwhelms you
About This Audiobook
Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of a Limerick childhood defined by poverty, religious austerity, and the alcoholism of his father Malachy. Written with the precise, unpitying clarity of a man who has achieved enough distance to look directly at what he survived, McCourt's account of growing up in one of Ireland's poorest slums is simultaneously devastating and alive with the dark humor of people who have nothing left to lose through laughter.
McCourt narrates his own memoir in a voice that carries both the Irish cadences of the setting and the American consciousness through which he filters them. The combination creates exactly the double perspective the memoir requires, a man who has arrived somewhere safe looking back at somewhere he barely escaped. No hired narrator could replicate the authority of this performance.