Name: Josh Weil, WHAT CAME WEST
Start: 2026-07-01T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-07-01T20:00:00-07:00
Location: The Elliott Bay Book Company

A gripping tale of M**der set against the shifting Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, where ambition, violence, and destiny collide
About this Event

Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea, The New Valley, and The Age of Perpetual Light, visits the store for his new novel What Came West, a gripping tale of M**der 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 M**der, 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.

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.