What Came West

**The author of the New York Times Notable The Great Glass Sea (“The most unexpected second book by a writer of note to appear in years.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe) 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. In interweaving parts, one a third-person account of Silas’s flight from the manhunt that pursues him and the other an epistolary narrative from Silas to his abandoned son, What Came West confronts different forms of American inheritance: the yearning for freedom and the grandeur of the wild, the corrupting nature of greed, the unforgiving ideals of Manifest Destiny, and the environmental destruction and genocide wrought upon native peoples living on the land that would become known as “Gold Country.” What Came West is the story of a soul split after a defining moment and the ways in which one man tries to save himself and the world he loves as it vanishes beneath his feet.