Winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Award.

          "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

          "Writing in prose that’s pictorial and tactile, lyrical but streetwise, Mr McCourt does for the town of Limerick what the young Joyce did for Dublin: he conjures the place for us with such intimacy that we feel we’ve walked its streets and crawled its pubs."