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Simon & Schuster
March 2008
On Sale: March 4, 2008
352 pages ISBN: 141655159X EAN: 9781416551591 Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly
British, discovers that her birth parents are from the
American South, she finds that "culture clash" has layers
of meaning she'd never imagined. Meet The English
American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut
novel that sprang from Larkin's autobiographical one-woman
show of the same name. 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.
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