What Came West
A Novel
by Josh Weil
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Pub Date Jun 02 2026 | Archive Date Jun 30 2026
Doubleday Books | Doubleday
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Description
Since childhood, Silas Hall has never been at ease with people. Only alone in nature, can he find peace. He is relentlessly bullied by classmates and even proximity to his own family fills him with dread. Still, despite his increasing isolation from others, he manages to forge a connection with Delia, a non-verbal housekeeper, and is surprised by the strength of the bond he feels with the child they come to share. But as his son, Elisha, grows up, even that closeness becomes more than Silas can bear. So, he leaves his family to travel west, journeying ever farther in search of a life in which he might belong.
Under the cover of the wilderness, Silas burrows deeper into seclusion. By late 1840, he is one of few white people to have crossed the Sierra Nevada, where he coexists with the native Nisenan villagers at a mutually wary distance. But this fragile peace is disrupted when the promises of the Gold Rush bring a sudden flood of other whites west, leading Silas to commit an act of violence that will drive the last chapter of his life and incur upon the world he loves the full wrath of the world he fled.
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.
Advance Praise
“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
Marketing Plan
National Review and Media Appearances, including NPR and Print/Online Features
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Available on NetGalley
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780385550994 |
| PRICE | $32.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 512 |
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