Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt's Limerick

Frank McCourt's parents met in New York and came back to Limerick when the work ran out, sinking into the lanes with the alcoholism that shaped the whole book. His father left for the factories of wartime Coventry when Frank was eleven and rarely sent money home. Angela's Ashes came out in 1996 and took the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography the following year, for a memoir of exactly that — misery, squalor, and a comic timing that makes it readable. The city it describes has largely been cleared, which is part of what you are looking at: the lanes are gone, and the walk is about what replaced them.