Bio
ALISON LARKIN is a comedienne, award-winning audiobook narrator, producer, actress, screenwriter, speaker and Berkshire resident. She is also the bestselling author of The English American, an autobiographical novel based on the true story of Larkin’s adoption by British parents and reunion with her American birth parents.
After leaving London University and training as an actress at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art Alisonbegan writing plays and acting in rep. Leading roles included Ginny in Relatively Speaking at the Royal Theatre Northampton and Flora Post in Cold Comfort Farm at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. |
Her first one-woman show, from which her novel sprang was a critically acclaimed hit at the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Edinburgh Festival’s Assembly rooms and the Soho Theater in London’s West End. In Los Angeles she spent three years under studio development contract to star in her own sitcom with CBS Studios, ABC TV and Jim Henson productions while performing, speaking and voicing dozens of cartoons and movies from NPR’s The Wonderful World of Oz opposite Annette Bening and Phyllis Diller to Disney’s Pocahontas to The Wonderpets.
Featured Title | The English American: A Novel
In many ways, Pippa Dunn is very English: she eats Marmite on toast, knows how to make a proper cup of tea, has attended a posh English boarding school, and finds it entirely familiar to discuss the crossword rather than exchange any cross words over dinner with her proper English family. Yet Pippa -- creative, disheveled, and impulsive to the core -- has always felt different from her perfectly poised, smartly coiffed sister and steady, practical parents, whose pastimes include Scottish dancing, gardening, and watching cricket.
When Pippa learns at age twenty-eight that her birth parents are from the American South, she feels that lifelong questions have been answered. She meets her birth mother, an untidy, artistic, free-spirited redhead, and her birth father, a charismatic (and politically involved) businessman in Washington, D.C.; and she moves to America to be near them. At the same time, she relies on the guidance of a young man with whom she feels a mysterious connection; a man who discovered his own estranged father and who, like her birth parents, seems to understand her in a way that no one in her life has done before. Pippa feels she has found her "self" and everything she thought she wanted. But has she?
Caught between two opposing cultures, two sets of parents, and two completely different men, Pippa is plunged into hilarious, heart-wrenching chaos. The birth father she adores turns out to be involved in neoconservative activities she hates; the mesmerizing mother who once abandoned her now refuses to let her go. And the man of her fantasies may be just that...
With an authentic adopted heroine at its center, Larkin's compulsively readable first novel unearths universal truths about love, identity, and family with wit, warmth, and heart.