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.