Out in the Open

Out in the Open is a novel by the Spanish writer Jesús Carrasco, published in English translation in 2015. Its country is deliberately unnamed and its dates do not matter: the drought and the violence in it could belong anywhere, and the world it describes is one where the morals have drained away with the water.

A boy has run away from home and is crossing an arid plain, driven by whatever is behind him and by the need to get beyond it. There is no water and no shelter in the country he is crossing, and the people he meets along the road are as dangerous as the heat.

One night he comes across an old goatherd, a man who lives simply and decently and who takes the boy in without asking many questions. Their paths stay joined as they travel on together, and the boy is left with a choice he is barely old enough to make: to hold on to some hope and courage, or to live inside the cycle of violence he was raised in.