Gardens in the Dunes

In a novel that moves with extraordinary fluidity and grace between two diametrically opposed worlds -- the timeless, "traditional" world of Native American peoples and the elaborate, stylized world of European and American upper-class culture at its glittering, falsely glamorous zenith before the First World War -- Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of such highly praised works of fiction as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, has written what Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, calls "a little masterpiece."