Life on earth is fading to a whisper. Faced with a stalled future of economic precarity and mounting authoritarianism, Carlos and Aitana must make a decision, monumental and world-altering, about what they are prepared to sacrifice to cleave to life.

Through sleight of hand and ingenious puzzle-like logic, The White Desert orbits Carlos and Aitana’s story and emerges as a collective portrait, mapping the true cost of our frictionless lifestyles. Effortlessly moving between genres, it is an adventure novel for an era of globalism, an epistolary novel set in a world of near-instantaneous communication, and a mystery novel which plays out amid bountiful data and hyperconnectivity.

Haunting and elegiac, Luis López Carrasco’s award-winning debut is an inventive portrait of what life on earth today looks like when taken at a distance, and of our shared fate among the stars.