What Came West

“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 Loot