Author Frank McCourt is to release a new Angela's Ashes-themed book for the 2007 Christmas market.
The book, entitled Angela and the Baby Jesus, will come in adult and children's editions and will be based on McCourt's mother, Angela, and her relationship with a statue of the baby Jesus at St Joseph's church in Limerick, near School House Lane where the McCourt family grew up.
The book's publishers, Simon & Schuster and Scribner, hope to capitalise on the huge success of McCourt's first memoir, Angela's Ashes, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.
Two later biographies, 'Tis and Teacher Man, also sold well but McCourt had come under intense pleading from his publishers to write an Angela's Ashes-themed Christmas book.
Susan Moldow, a publisher at Scribner said that she and McCourt's long-time editor, Nan Graham, has been asking McCourt for a Christmas book "since the heady early days of Angela's Ashes".
McCourt said he was delighted to be finally publishing a Christmas book.
"This is a book about children and Christmas - what could be better? Buy many copies for many children and their adults," he said.
In the new book, he uses the same child's voice he used in Angela's Ashes to recall a story his mother told him about life as a six-year-old in Limerick and her love of the crib in St Joseph's Church.
As well as Simon & Shuster's illustrated children's edition, Scribner will publish a "family gift book edition" for adults.
The publishers say the new book will have universal appeal, similar to Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.