What Came West

The author of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize winning novel The Great Glass Sea returns with a gripping adventure story that probes the expansive, shifting wilds of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush.

“Like a patient pine or ancient mineral, Josh Weil watches history and humanity in What Came West, with an attention that feels as monumental as the wilderness and wildness he transcendently portrays.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

Sierra Nevada, 1840s, just before the Gold Rush ignites. Silas Hall has never belonged anywhere except the wild. Bullied as a child and uneasy even within his own family, he finds brief solace in love and fatherhood before the pull of the frontier overwhelms him. One day he vanishes west, chasing a life that might finally make sense.

What follows is a swift, pulse-pounding journey into the mountains, where Silas becomes one of the first white settlers to cross into the Sierra Nevada. He forges a precarious peace with the Indigenous people who live there—until the Gold Rush crashes in with violent force. As thousands flood the region, the balance shatters, and Silas commits a murder that alters the course of every life around him, including his own.

What Came West is a taut, atmospheric, and thrillingly propulsive novel that confronts many different forms of American inheritance, and it is alive with danger, emotional voltage, and an almost mythic momentum. It’s a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.“Like a patient pine or ancient mineral, Josh Weil watches history and humanity in What Came West, with an attention that feels as monumental as the wilderness and wildness he transcendently portrays.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

“A dark, beautiful, and challenging novel of westward expansion….The rawness and intensity of What Came West recall Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree—the harshness, the urgency, the sudden violence, elevated by Weil’s soaring language.” —Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

“There’s solace, patience, lush beauty, and bristling terror in the words and woods of What Came West, a great novel that mines the California Gold Rush—a time of seismic environmental and societal change—for the truths we need today. Josh Weil is a meticulous researcher as well as a keen observer of humanity and nature, as you'll see in his finely detailed drawings and vividly realized characters. Prepare to be transported; these pages will swallow you up like the jaws of the wilderness.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal, Red Moon, The Dead Lands, and Thrill Me

“No writer mines the mysterious connections between humanity and land and history as memorably as Josh Weil. What Came West is a feat of the imagination, as mythic as it is intimate, as tender as it is relentless. It’s also quite simply a masterpiece, one that had me so hooked from its opening pages, I didn’t want to come up for air.” —Tania James, author of LootJOSH WEIL is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea, the novella collection The New Valley, and the story collection The Age of Perpetual Light. He is a Fulbright Fellow and has been awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the California Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. For the past dozen years he has called the Sierra Nevada of Northern California home.