Almanac of the Dead

<b>&#147;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.&#148; &#151;Maxine Hong Kingston</b><br><br> <b>From&#160;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<br> </b><br> In its extraordinary range of character and culture <i>Almanac of the Dead</i> 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&#151;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&#151;a Native American Almanac of the Dead.&#160;<br><br> Through the violent lives of Lecha's extended familiy a many-layered narrative unfolds to tell the magnificent tragic and unforgettable story of the&#160;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.