Any Resemblance to Actual Persons: A Novel [Paperback]

In the spirit of Motherless Brooklyn or Remains of the Day, Allardice offers up a searing and memorable debut.

When Paul McWeeney's older sister writes a book accusing their late father of committing the gruesome Black Dahlia murder, based on memories her new therapist has helped her recover, or imagine, he sits down to write a cease and desist letter to the publishers. Paul hopes to refute his sister's claims about their father's role in the infamous 1947 murder, arguing for his own divergent memory of their Hollywood childhood by way of defending their father's name and legacy. But the letter begins to take on a life of its own, and Paul, a failed novelist and community college writing instructor, soon finds himself on an obsessive, elliptical exploration of both his family's history and his own conflicted memory, which begins to absorb his daily life and threaten his relationships with those, closest to him. The letter becomes not the intended refutation but rather a disturbing and wildly comical psychological self–portrait of man caught between increasingly unstable versions of the past.Praise for Any Resemblance to Actual Persons

Digression becomes an art form and an unexpected path to truth in this beautiful debut novel by Kevin Allardice. Any Resemblance to Actual Persons is a funny, sad, and profound book. –Matthew Sharpe, author of You Were Wrong

Any Resemblance to Actual Persons is a master class in voice, and a comic novel of searing insight and intelligence. This is the book Thomas Bernhard might have written had he been raised in California on a diet of police procedurals and Raymond Chandler novels, and was a bit less grumpy. – Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen

A giddy and delirious romp through the back (bowling) alleys of memory, Any Resemblance to ló%