09/13/2026
About the Book: Unfolding over the first half of the 19th century, across an America relentlessly reshaped by its exploding population, WHAT CAME WEST is the story of a world as yet unaltered by that onrush of whites—the Sierra Nevada of the 1840s, before the discovery of gold—and a man, white himself but fleeing his own kind, who finds in that wilderness a refuge, only to see it violently ripped away and, in his desperation, violently attempt to save it. Since childhood, Silas Hall had been painfully sensitive to the proximity of people, their sounds, smells, simply their presence enough to set him shaking, send him into fits. Only with animals does he feel at ease; only the whispers of grass and leaves can soothe him. It is an affliction that leaves him friendless, a disorder that one night will drive him to abandon wife and son and set him fleeing on a years-long journey ever farther west. Until at last—in the solitude of the Sierras, shunned by the Nisenan already there, living merely as a human animal among non-human ones—he finds a kind of peace. For a few years. Before the Gold Rush shatters it. Shatters him. Leads him to commit an act of such violence it will bring upon the world he loves the wrath of the one he fled.
About the Author: 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 Sierra Nevada of Northern California home.
