What Came West

“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

“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

“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…..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

“Josh Weil has created that rare thing: a perfect literary western. He joins the good company of Thomas Berger, Charles Portis and Larry McMurtry but brings his own vision to the American West….A tour de force…by a writer at the height of his power.” —Tom Franklin, Edgar Award winner and author of New York Times bestseller Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter