Coming May 2025
Coming May 6, 2025
Home of the American Circus
“Told with compassion, humor, and honesty, Allison Larkin’s stunning Home of the American Circus is a poignant tale of estrangement, redefining family, reckoning with the past, and healing through challenging but ultimately empowering circumstances. Readers will fall in love with Larkin’s cast of vivid characters and won’t want to say goodbye at the end of the book.”
~Cassandra Dunn, author of The Art of Adapting
about
Home of the American Circus
The acclaimed author of the “lyrical coming-of-age novel” (Good Morning America) The People We Keep returns with a luminous new story of redemption, breaking generational curses, and the power of family in its truest form.
After an emergency leaves her short on rent, thirty-year-old Freya Arnalds bails on her lackluster life as bartender in Maine and returns to her suburban hometown of Somers, New York, to live in the house she inherited from her estranged parents. Despite attempts to lay low, Freya encounters childhood friends, familial enemies, and old flames—as well as her fifteen-year-old niece, Aubrey, who is secretly living in the derelict home. As they reconnect, Freya and Aubrey lean on each other, working to restore the house and come to terms with the devastating events that pulled them apart years ago.
Set in the birthplace of the American circus, this deeply moving novel is an exploration of broken families, the weight of the past, and the complicated journey of finding home.
About allison
Allison Larkin is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Home of the American Circus, The People We Keep, Stay, Why Can’t I Be You, and Swimming for Sunlight, and co-host of the podcast Now That We Think About It with Alice Carbone Tench. Her short fiction has been published in The Summerset Review and Slice, and her nonfiction in Author in Progress from Writer’s Digest Books, as well as the dog anthology I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Jeremy, and their rescue dogs, Roxy and Bosley.