Angela's Ashes: 'Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood', so writes Frank McCourt in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This is a story of extreme poverty and hardship that is not for the faint hearted. Indeed it sometimes traverses the line between entertainment and enlightenment.

This is a story of the fight against poverty. The McCourt family moved back from America where they had gone to make a life and returned to Limerick city at a time when Ireland had little to offer them. When disease, hunger and malnutrition takes his brothers and sisters from him, young Frankie and his brother Malachy grow up little realising that life has more to offer than old potatoes and boiled pigs head for Christmas dinner. The family were crammed into a tenement slum. The upstairs room was 'Italy', warm and dry. Downstairs was Ireland, wet and cold. The rats, the death, the shared latrine and the smell of poverty and neglect pervade every paragraph of this powerful book.

If young Frank is the hero of the story then it is difficult to regard his father as an anti-hero. His drunkeness and eventual abandonment of his family are upsetting and yet we still cannot quite condemn him. Frankies mother, Angela, is regarded with little emotion by the author and the description of her struggle and humiliation are only very occasionally tinged with anything approaching pity.

This typical tale of an Irish childhood is now the subject of a major motion picture directed by Alan Parker with Robert Carlyle and Emily Lloyd in the lead roles.

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