Traveling across the landscapes of California, two brothers--a recent parolee and a Berkeley professor--go in search of their teenage sister who has vanished, looking for the reasons why she left home.

High in the hills of Berkeley, California, a father summons his two sons, Leonardo, a biology professor, and Gabriel, a recent parolee, and tasks them with locating their seventeen-year-old sister, Lenore, who has vanished, leaving a two-word note that simply reads: I'm okay.

The brothers' quests carry them in opposite directions--one northward to the Oregon border, the other southward to the Mexican border--as they search the length of California not just for their sister but for the reasons why she left home, reasons that will lead them into the heart of their mysterious family vocation of powerful healers.

In lyrical and precise prose, Buchholz conjures the lost horizons of the American West. The Cartographer of Sands charts the border territory--between the US and Mexico, between family members, between the ordinary and the mystical. Buccholz maps an undiscovered country of ancestral lineage, family connection, and existential revelation through characters that are at once familiar and profoundly mysterious.