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A gripping tale of murder and pursuit set against the shifting Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, where ambition, violence, and destiny collide.
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 heads 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 murder, a desperate act that alters the course of every life around him, including his own.
Taut and propulsive, What Came West is told in two parallel voices—one a tense, third-person account of Silas on the run, and the other a confessional letter from Silas to the son he left behind—and confronts many different forms of American inheritance, in all its danger, emotional voltage, and mythic momentum. Weil's masterpiece is a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.
"A reclusive trapper rejected by society fights for survival on a westward trek filled with treacherous encounters….Written under the influence of Cormac McCarthy and perhaps James Joyce…[What Came West is] a powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The author astonishes in his ability to imbue Silas, whom the reader meets as a murderer, with sympathy and depth. Weil's revisionist western offers a stirring meditation on solitude and the ravages of the Gold Rush." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Adventurous and propulsive....Weil's richly researched work is equal parts historical fiction, thriller, and sketchbook of animals and plant life. It's as much a dedication to humanity as to the harsh reality of what it means to endure for and in spite of mankind." —Library Journal
"This novel has its fair share of adventure, but is also thoughtful on a number of levels, not least of which is the freedom, beauty, and peace of nature threatened at every turn by man's interaction with it." —Historical Novel Society
"Astonishing. Unraveling the mythology of the Western, Weil tells the story anew: a beautiful, ruminative, bloody, terrifying and brilliant book about a chapter in the life of one man and in the life of our country. Unmissable." —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
"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
This information about What Came West was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Josh 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.
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