Alexandra McNear
Writer Reader Editor
My Story
Alexandra McNear is a writer, editor, and passionate reader. She has written for several Long Island newspaper and documentary films, and she’s ghost co-written six books of commercial fiction. McNear has worked as a developmental and content editor for many first time novelists, memoir writers, and non-fiction writers. Her first novel, The River Burning, is a meditation on family, the beauty of the west, the environment, and loss. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Alexandra is a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles. She lives in Sag Harbor, New York, with her husband.
Upcoming Books
The River Burning
The narrator of The River Burning, Clio Livingworth, comes of age in the 1970s in the shadow of the Hoover Dam in the town of Boulder City, Nevada, where the blue waters of Lake Mead and the austere beauty of the Mojave Desert are just outside her back door.
When Clio is eleven years old, she and her brother and sister are forced to pack their bags and flee to the haunting steppes and colorful badlands of Arizona’s Petrified Forest. They will stay there for only one day, but the trip will mark that decisive moment in time when Clio’s family life begins to unravel and her childhood is transformed from an idyllic one into a landscape filled with menacing and shadowy figures. Over the next twenty years, Clio will become the self-designated unauthorized historian bent on uncovering the mysteries buried in three generations of her blended family. As Clio discovers the truth about herself and her family, she must contend with the ramifications of a several crimes, the loss of one sibling and the disappearance of the other, the dark secret motivating her mother, and her own shifting identity.
Quotes
“In so far as reading initiates us, insofar as her magic key opens the door deep inside us to the dwelling places we would not otherwise have known how to reach, its role in our life is a salutary one.”
Marcel Proust, On Reading
