FRANK McCOURT was born in Brooklyn in 1930, the eldest child of Malachy McCourt of Toome, Co Antrim, and Angela Sheehan of the city of Limerick. Angela was just fresh off the boat when she found herself pregnant by Malachy, and both of them were ill prepared for life in the America of the Depression. Angela never had a chance to make anything of herself other than a baby factory, and Malachy's drinking prevented him from making anything of himself, though as an ex IRA man he is a great one for republican rhetoric and "Roddy McCorley" when he comes home with his wages drunk and his wife and kids crying with dread and hunger.

Twin boys were born soon after Frank, and soon after them, a girl, Margaret, who dies in her mother's arms after seven weeks of wretched life. After Margaret's death, the family returns to Ireland, first to Malachy's people in the North, who are no help, then to Limerick. According to Frank, they should have stayed where they were. He's right.

If life in Brooklyn was tough, it proves to be virtually impossible at home, where Depression scarcely begins to describe conditions. What little Angela's family can spare is given grudgingly. Malachy can't find work (there are revealing asides on anti Northerner prejudice), or when he does can't hold it for the same reasons as before. It turns out that he's not eligible for an IRA pension. Two more children are born.

The twins die of pneumonia as the family tion, Frank is diagnosed with typhoid. Later on, he suffers from chronic conjunctivitis. And overshadowing the squalor and blight of life in the lanes is the moral inadequacy of the public sphere. Not one area of public life seems ready or able to discharge its function. The administration of housing, education, health, and sanitation, is pathologically invested in the defensive articulation of its own judgmental ethos rather than in responding to the needs of those seeking help. "The greatest of these is charity": try telling that to Frank, as the Christian Brother shuts the door to educational opportunity in his face. Try telling it to Angela, as she stares into the ashes of a fire long dead after the St Vincent de Paul men have come assessing.

Then the second World War breaks out and there is a mass exodus to England of the men and single women of the lanes. Even Malachy goes, despite predictable ideological misgivings. But he doesn't change. No regular Saturday telegram of money comes from him. Eventually he drifts out of the picture for good, and Frank, still in primary school, becomes his family's financial mainstay, first selling the Limerick Leader with his mentally defective uncle, then working as - a coal beaver's mate. After leaving school, Frank works as a telegram boy and has a part time position writing threatening letters for an old crone of a money lender. He sees his world very clearly through his cacky eyes: it's a cacky world. He can't wait to go to America, and before he is twenty, he does.

Though organised along broadly chronological lines, Angela's Ashes is, like many a memoir, more a tissue of powerful scenes than a straightforward or even particularly reliable story. Many of its scenes are unforgettable - Angela's two hefty cousins descending on Malachy to ensure he'll do the right thing by the girl he got pregnant; the family's removal to what Malachy called "Italy", the dry upstairs room of their little house (the effluent flooded downstairs was "Ireland"); a starving Frank licking the grease from a sheet of newspaper that chips were wrapped in.

But just as unforgettable is the author's tone. It's not just the squalor and deprivation of the lanes that are reproduced here. So is their improvisatory wit, their rage for more than the provisional, their cocky disinclination to know their place. Those are the intangibles that inform the book's many vivid portraits and that see Frank McCourt through. Now, with sly knowingness, he celebrates the resilient spirit's performance even as he maps the dire venues of frail flesh. Sombre, funny, unnerving, buoyant. Angela's Ashes is an unlikely but undeniable treat to read and an undoubted feat to have written.