Out in the Open by Jesús Carrasco

Jesús Carrasco presents his award-winning debut novel about a boy fleeing across an unnamed, drought-stricken country ruled by unspeakable violence.

“From inside his hole in the ground, he heard the sound of voices calling his name.” So begins Out in the Open by award-winning Spanish author Jesús Carrasco. The boy crouching in the hole is escaping abuse, hiding in a grave of his own making. He eventually emerges, but his destiny is not one of ease.

From its haunting opening words to its heartbreaking conclusion, Out in the Open is a stark novel. Carrasco’s debut is already a bestseller in Europe, has won the 2016 European Union Prize for Literature and the English PEN Award, and will be published in over 21 countries. Riverhead Books published Margaret Jull Costa’s translation on July 4, 2017.

Out in the Open takes place in a chilling dystopia that calls to mind the bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Samuel Beckett’s theater. We’re introduced to a boy hiding beneath the ground from an armed mob sent to capture him, and we follow him as he flees across an unnamed, drought-stricken country ruled by unspeakable violence. As he crosses this barren landscape, he is faced with a choice that will determine the direction of the rest his life: choose hope and bravery, or live forever mired in the brutality with which he grew up.

A tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation, Out in the Open is simultaneously a heart-stopping adventure across a grim wasteland; a deeply moving story of a boy’s struggle to survive; and a frightening reflection of the anxieties of our times.

For readers who loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jesús Carrasco’s ;Out in the Open will hit some of the same notes.

–Bookish

Contemporary novels rarely engage so plainly with faith and physical suffering… beautifully written… This is a novel in which heartbreak doesn’t matter. Only survival does.

–Los Angeles Review of Books