Arts-Entertainment
Wheatgrass Books will host award-winning author Josh Weil for a reading and book signing of his new novel, What Came West, on Thursday, September 17th from 6 to 8 pm. The event is free and open to the public.
Described as “True Grit” meets “The Revenant” meets “Lonesome Dove,” What Came West (Doubleday, 2026) is a sweeping and emotionally charged historical adventure set in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada at the cusp of the Gold Rush.
Set in the 1840s, before the discovery of gold, the novel follows Silas Hall, a man deeply unsettled by the presence of other people but at home among animals and the wilderness. After abandoning his wife and son, Silas travels ever farther west, eventually finding a fragile sense of peace in the Sierra Nevada. But the arrival of the Gold Rush shatters that refuge and sets in motion an act of violence that will force him to confront the very world—and the people—he had fled.
Told in two intricately woven narratives, What Came West moves between the manhunt that follows Silas’s violent act and an epistolary account he writes to his lost son. The result is a haunting exploration of American mythology, wilderness, greed, westward expansion and the devastating legacy of the Gold Rush.
“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,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer.
National Book Award finalist Téa Obreht calls the novel “a remarkable and layered page-turner,” praising its “finely tuned eerieness and twisting psychological horror.”
Weil is the author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley, and his work has earned numerous honors, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award, the California Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. A Fulbright Fellow, Weil has spent the past dozen years living in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California.
His intimate knowledge of the landscape informs What Came West. An avid outdoorsman, Weil has explored and traveled extensively throughout the Sierra Nevada, including the terrain featured in the novel. He has also undertaken expeditions in places ranging from Appalachia and Egypt’s Western Desert to Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains and the Mongolian Steppe.
Weil is also a visual artist and lithographer. He spent six months creating the twenty intricate dip-pen illustrations that appear throughout What Came West.
Josh Weil: What Came West
- When: Thursday, September 17th
- Time: 6 to 8 pm
- Location: Wheatgrass Books, 120 North Main Street, Livingston
Join Wheatgrass Books for an evening with one of the most distinctive voices writing about the American West today. Copies of What Came West will be available for purchase and signing.
About Wheatgrass Books
Wheatgrass Books is an independent, woman-owned bookstore in historic downtown Livingston, Montana, offering a thoughtfully curated selection of books with a special emphasis on Montana and the wider West. The bookstore also hosts author events, readings, art exhibitions and community gatherings.