Leslie Marmon Silko, author of the longstanding favorite, Ceremony, fuses elements of her family’s heritage with Native myths and reflections on the natural world in her beautiful memoir THE TURQUOISE LEDGE (Viking, $25.95). In her preface, Silko acknowledges that memory is imagination at work. Her imaginative self-storytelling travels across boundaries of time to share aspects of her life as they are remembered; she discusses her first divorce alongside the eradication of the Laguna language. Silko’s insight is shaped by the spiritual power of nature and a keen appreciation for the contradictions and ironies within Native history. Her stories are unified by turquoise and her vision of the world is straightforward: the landscapes of the rapidly changing natural world are woven with memories of the past and cautions to a future that are each complicated by the loss of languages, cultures, and land.
