Books Like Angela's Ashes

Trevor Noah

Like McCourt, Noah turns a difficult childhood into funny, affectionate storytelling. His memoir of growing up in apartheid-era South Africa keeps the warmth and sharp observation that make Angela's Ashes so readable.

Jeannette Walls

Walls recounts a chaotic, impoverished childhood with a steady, unsentimental voice. Fans of McCourt's frank portrait of a difficult family will find the same mix of hardship and love.

Mary Karr

Karr's memoir of a troubled Texas childhood is lyrical and funny in the same way McCourt's is. Its focus on family damage told from a child's sharp viewpoint echoes the emotional core of Angela's Ashes.

Colm Tóibín

Set around the Irish emigrant experience, this quiet novel shares Angela's Ashes' sense of Irish life and its hold on the people who leave it. Its careful, restrained prose suits readers who appreciated McCourt's sense of place.

James Joyce

These linked stories capture the everyday lives, small disappointments and stifling streets of Irish city life. Readers who loved the texture of McCourt's Limerick will recognise the same attention to ordinary people.

Claire Keegan

This short, spare novel is set in a small Irish town and looks at poverty and conscience with great restraint. Its compact power will appeal to readers who valued the honest, unflinching view of Irish hardship in McCourt's book.

Tara Westover

Westover describes a childhood shaped by poverty and an unconventional family, told with clear-eyed honesty. It offers the same sense of a young person working out who they are against a hard upbringing.

Jung Chang

Chang tells the story of three generations of her family in twentieth-century China, with the personal stakes of a child caught in history. Like McCourt, she shows how public hardship shapes private family life.

John Kennedy Toole

Toole's novel is a comic portrait of an eccentric, struggling city life, full of colourful characters. Readers who enjoyed the wry, bleakly funny tone of Angela's Ashes will enjoy its sharp humour.

Jerome Klapka Jérôme

This classic is a light, episodic account of a river trip full of self-deprecating jokes. It offers a break from heavier material while keeping the wry, conversational voice that makes McCourt's memoir so enjoyable.

Stella Gibbons

Gibbons satirises a bleak rural family with brisk, witty prose that never lets the gloom win. Readers who appreciated the comic edge running through the hardship of Angela's Ashes will find this equally entertaining.