JASON BUCHHOLZ at Books Inc. Alameda

Join us in person at Books Inc. Alameda for an awesome event featuring Jason Buchholz.

Jason Buchholz is also the author of A Paper Son, He is the co-founder and co-owner of Collaborist, an editorial studio, and has worked as a ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach for two decades. Previous adventures in letters have included stints as a journalist and a travel writer. Elsewhere, he’s a judo instructor and an outdoorsman. He holds a BA in psychology from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. He lives in northern California with his son and his daughter.

About The Cartographer of Sands -

Just before her high-school graduation, Lenore Percival sneaks out of her Berkeley home with a backpack full of plant magic and only a spotty understanding—gleaned from her ethnobotanist grandfather’s notebooks and from her own dreams and visions—of how to administer it. Unable to turn to the authorities, her parents send her older brothers, one a professor and the other a parolee, to track her down and bring her home. One brother’s journey takes him northward to the Oregon border before he returns, while the other’s takes him southward, into the desert along the US-Mexico border, where their grandfather lived and studied and worked. Along the way, the siblings collect glimmers of the truth of their family’s secret heritage, a powerful legacy of psychedelic healing that runs through their mother, a famous classical pianist, their grandfather, and their great-grandmother, a legendary shaman from Sonora. Only when they converge are Lenore and her brothers able to understand their place in this strange and sprawling family tree.

“Masterful and wondrous. Each character, all of them thrumming with so much life they deserve their own novel, moves through this relentless, unique story into a finale that opens into the universe. The reader walks through virtually every bit of California’s differing landscapes alongside them, feeling every single moment. Cartographer of Sands is both a California novel and an American novel, and rich and true in both of those veins.” — Lewis Buzbee, author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

“In Cartographer, Jason Buchholz charts the tremors of a family navigating secrets, mistakes, and the unknowable depths of their ancestry. Told with a lyrical hand and an eye for sensory detail, the story unfolds with no signposts—just the raw, immediate experience of characters living through what they cannot yet understand. This is a novel where the mystical brushes up against the mundane—where visions bloom behind truck stops, and the sacred slips into the everyday. Rich in specificity and a profound sense of place, Cartographer explores the ripple effects of seemingly unrelated choices, the shifting lines of identity and purpose, and the maps we draw to find our way back to ourselves and each other.” — Nikki Van De Car, author of The Invisible Wild

“Mesmerizing and magical, perfect from the first page to the last.” — Pedro Hoffmeister, author of American Afterlife

“The Cartographer of Sands is the story of the search for a young woman who vanishes under strange circumstances that leads the seekers to a place where myth and magic intersect. With radiant prose and an eye for the extraordinary, Jason Buchholz has crafted a beguiling mystery in the shifting sands of family history.” — Jim Ruland, author of Make It Stop

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