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Cover of Angela's Ashes

How long does it take to read Angela's Ashes?

Frank McCourt

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt takes about 7 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 55 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1996. 432 pages, about 118,800 words.

16 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 13 hours 12 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 55 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 57 minutes

The page count is the median across 101 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"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 the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. in the 1930s and 40s. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling -- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. 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 neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. - Jacket flap.

Subjects: Irish Americans, Irlandeses-americanos, Family, Social life and customs, Norteamericanos de origen irlandés, Children

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