"To read this book is to hear the voices of the ancestors and spirits
telling us where we came from, who we are, and where we must go."
--Maxine Hong Kingston
**From critically acclaimed author Leslie Marmon Silko, an epic novel
about people caught between two cultures and two times: the modern-day
Southwest, and the places of the old ones, the native peoples of the
Americas
**
In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the
Dead is fiction on the grand scale, a brilliant, haunting, and tragic
novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. At the heart of this story
is Seese, an enigmatic survivor of the fast-money, high-risk world of
drug dealing--a world in which the needs of modern America exist in a
dangerous balance with Native American traditions. Seese has been drawn
back to the Southwest in search of her missing child. In Tuscon, she
encounters Lecha, a well-known psychic who is hiding from the
consequences of her celebrity. Lecha's larger duty is to transcribe the
ancient, painfully preserved notebooks that contain the history of her
own people--a Native American Almanac of the Dead.
Through the violent lives of Lecha's extended familiy, a many-layered
narrative unfolds to tell the magnificent, tragic, and unforgettable
story of the struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all
costs, the core of their culture: their way of seeing, their way of
believing, their way of being.
