ALIBI CREEK
by Bev Magennis
March 2016 | Fiction | 978-1-937226-55-8 | 288 pp | $16.95
Following a two-year prison stint, charming and wily Walker returns to his family’s New Mexico ranch, where his pious older sister Lee Ann is busy caring for their mother, raising two sons, and grappling with unethical workplace demands. As Walker’s reckless life careens into Lee Ann’s careful one, a drastic transformation of beliefs, identities, and relationships ensues. Alibi Creek explores the weight of sibling bonds, the healing power of place, and one woman’s rebirth in the wild and fragile landscape surrounding the small-town Southwest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BEV MAGENNIS was born in Toronto, Canada, and immigrated to the United States in 1964. She received her MA in Art from the Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California. After a thirty-five-year career as an artist, she started writing, inspired by the land and people in the New Mexico wilderness where she lived for seventeen years. Magennis is an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Graduate Class and recipient of a Pen USA Emerging Voices Fellowship and a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fiction Fellowship. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
PRAISE FOR ALIBI CREEK
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“Magennis brings a kind of poetic excitement to the landscape from the very first page. She has a talent for crisp dialogue, tight narrative and vivid characterization.”
—ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
“Superb, spellbinding. . . . [Magennis’s] imagery and its foreshadowing impact echoes the cumulative practice of a well-honed artistic eye.”
—THE UTAH REVIEW
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“A saga set in the wilds of New Mexico. . . . Lee Ann is a heroine readers will root for.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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“Something of a southwestern gothic, drawing inspiration from the spare depictions of the West in the novels of Annie Proulx and its familial drama from the likes of Faulkner, O’Connor, and their like. . . . [Alibi Creek] excels in its open-eyed portrayals of a land largely left untamed.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
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“Magennis captures the grit and sinew of men and women raised in the hardscrabble West . . . as authentic as the sagebrush of the western landscape.”
—SANDRA DALLAS, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Midwife
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"Magennis is a yarn spinner with a passion for the southwestern wilderness, the people who inhabit unlimited space, and drama created in a setting that allows for complete freedom. A book that will take you to a wild place, seldom visited and captivatingly portrayed.”
—JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN, author of Song of the Shank
“A novel about boundaries and belonging and facing up to when the old excuses no longer wash.”
—CHARLIE QUIMBY, author of Monument Road
“This stunning debut transforms and arrests the reader. The story stays with you long after you turn the last page.”
—LIBBY FLORES, PEN Center USA
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