Excerpt from The Invisible Mountain by Caro De Robertis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Your father," Nonno said. He stared at the ground. "You can't be like him."

"No."

"But you have to accept him."

"He's dead."

"Exactly."

Ignazio kicked a pebble. He nodded blankly."Are you going to leave?"

"Leave?"

"You know you can't stay here."

Ignazio felt transparent. He did know. Or he had wondered. His mother was gone; the family business was dead; his older brothers fought like vultures for its remnants; his sisters had married away. The house was a hull of shadows.

Nonno Umberto looked immensely tired. "You should go. Our name is cursed. And soon Italy will be at war again." He bent in closer. Ignazio smelled the tang of his white hair. "Listen. I have a little money in the floorboards, and I'll send you to the New World if you swear you'll build something. Gondolas, maybe, or something else, something useful over there, something worth building. Anything. Swear."

It broke, then, the canvas stretched over the world, and Ignazio was not numb, not in a painting after all: he stood in a raw, unfinished world, surrounded by the dead, exposing a fresh layer of living skin."I swear," he said.

As they turned back toward the burial, Ignazio looked across the water at Venezia. The city sprawled in all its dense, corrosive beauty. Gondolas split the water with their motion, with their silence, with their prows that aimed at faraway lands, at long-backed rivers and broadbacked seas that led to God knows where, to something new.

Four days later, Ignazio bought a ticket on a steamship. It was February 1, 1911. The boat was headed to Montevideo, a city he'd never heard of, but he was restless to embark, and in any case, the more anonymous, the better. He boarded and stowed his scanty possessions, then found a sailor and asked what Montevideo was like.

"The whores are cheap. Fishing's good. It's on the Río de la Plata."

Ignazio nodded and tried to smile.

They crossed the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic. The Italians reeked and retched and bent their hopeful words to sound more Spanish.

Babies shrieked and grown men wept like babies. Ignazio would have shriveled from loneliness if it had not been for Pietro, a Florentine shoemaker, the kind of man who could talk a statue into dancing. When they first met, Ignazio watched him roll a cigarette: he flicked the paper just so, as if it had been waiting to bend to his will, then twisted the ends, sealing all escape routes (surrender, tobacco, no fate for you but smoke). He brought it to his lips, the sun setting into the sea behind him as if slowly falling to its knees. Ignazio cleaved to him. He wanted to be like him, light, confident, disdainful of discussions of the past, swaggering across the deck as though the future were a naked woman, waiting, open-limbed.

They spent long afternoons leaning on the rails. They stared at the ocean. They smoked, stared, lit up, and smoked again, until the tobacco ran out and they just stared and gnawed on substitutes—fish scales, shreds of cloth, errant twigs from the homeland. Pietro treated Ignazio like an entertaining little brother (he was ten years older, twenty-seven or so), though he softened once Ignazio beat him at cards. Nights in brothels had made Ignazio a good gambler. Pietro laughed when Ignazio showed him his twelfth winning hand.

"Not bad. You'll need this skill in the New World."

New. World. It sounded fresh and large and daunting. Ignazio shuffled the cards and stole glances at the horizon, thin and blue and pressing at the sky.

Three months later, Ignazio—stinky and exultant—disembarked at the Montevideo port. A strange and satisfying stench assailed his nostrils: a mix of cowhide, sweat, piss, and the brash alkaline wind. The port burst with ships bearing flags from all over the world: England, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, and dozens of unfamiliar design. His fellow travelers poured around him like dazed children. He had thought Pietro was right behind him, but now he turned and turned and saw him nowhere. The air was heavy, humid. Voices rattled and screeched out singsong strings of Spanish words. People bustled everywhere: sailors, vendor women, grimy little children picking at dead fish. A boy looked up at him from the fish bins he was scrubbing. The boy's nose sloped widely to either side, and black eyes looked out of a face more darkly hued than he had ever seen. Pietro had assured him that Uruguay was full of Europeans and their descendants. A civilized place, he'd said.

Excerpted from The Invisible Mountains by Carolina De Robertis Copyright © 2009 by Carolina De Robertis. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.