The Cartographer of Sands

Coming fall 2025 from Green City Books.

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.

“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