Excerpt from All That Is Solid Melts into Air by Darragh McKeon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He may be nine years old, but he's ridden the Metro on his own countless times. It's been at least a year since he convinced his mother to allow him to travel alone. He goes to Mr. Leibniz's four times a week and waiting for his aunt or his mother to pick him up and bring him there was cutting into his rehearsal time. Yevgeni knew that if he could relate his argument to music, he was on strong ground. He got Mr. Leibniz to agree with this, in front of his mother, which took some doing, because Mr. Leibniz didn't like agreeing with him on anything. He didn't want Yevgeni getting ahead of himself.

So, his mother bought him a map and gave him a little perfume bottle that he was to spray into the eyes of anyone who came near. Of course he threw it away as soon as he could. Bringing a perfume bottle to school was just inviting pain.

The things he's seen since, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, when he comes home late. He's seen men with matted hair stretched out over a row of seats. He's seen couples bundled together under blankets that reflect the light with their dirty sheen. There are people who have loud conversations with God and people with no teeth, their faces sucked into the hollow of their mouths.

A man took out his penis once. In the end carriage this was. Took out his penis and pissed against the driver's door. A weighty slub of flesh. Yevgeni kept looking at it, then looking away and then looking back. He couldn't help it, such a secretive thing, out there in the air, in the light, alive. Steam coming off the stream of his raw piss. The liquid flowing down the train, fanning out into skinny tributaries. Yevgeni didn't want to pull his legs up, didn't want to draw the man's attention, so he let the piss lap against his shoes, flicker over his toes. Nobody raising an objection in the carriage, everyone else wrapped up under blankets, closed off from sensation.

He changes trains at Okhotny Ryad, his steps reverberating into the broken bone. By the time he gets on the red line aches are flaring up in other places. His shoulders and ribs are held by a numbness, as if he had unhinged them and left them in ice for a few hours. They too are turning in on themselves, preventing the vibrations from the tracks reaching the spongy insides of the bone. The screeching metal claws at his ears, pitched to the same intensity as his pain. All of this going on inside him, inside this train, as it bullets along, deep under the Moscow streets.

They reach the Universitet stop, and he slumps onto the platform, makes his way to the escalator. He pauses before it, secretly afraid of escalators, afraid he might fall down backways if he doesn't place his feet fully on the step. Once through the gates, he walks up a flight of wet steps, into the air. Rain is coming down in blustering sheets, thrashing onto the tarmac of Prospekt Vernadskogo. Water sweeps across the roofs of passing streetcars. It's evening, which he hadn't expected. Time has slinked along and now Yevgeni begins to worry that he might be too late, perhaps his aunt has finished with her class, maybe he'll have to go home after all, face the full force of his mother's questioning.

Through the trees of the campus, he can see the central tower of the Lomonosov, but it's further away than he expected, a ten-minute walk. The rain keeps building momentum, and as he reaches the campus gate, he decides instead to dash for shelter on the opposite side of the road, underneath the concrete canopy of the State Circus.

Thick streams of water fall from the rounded folds of its roof, mooring the building. Sodden ticket holders bustle into the glass auditorium, shedding their coats as soon as they're inside. In front of the steps below him, a man walks past pushing a bike with one wheel, half carrying, half coaxing it along, drops clinging to the strands of his thick beard. Yevgeni thinks at first that the man might be one of the performers, but then takes in his state of dishevelment and decides he can't be. Besides, what kind of tricks can you do with a clapped-out road bike? He tucks his damaged hand under his armpit. He wants to be at home, sitting beside the radiator, warming his hands with sweet tea. A wave of nausea rushes over him and Yevgeni realizes he hasn't eaten since breakfast. His hand is consuming all his concentration and strength. It's the only thing that matters right now. Café tables and chairs are abandoned all around him. With the sleeve of his free arm, Yevgeni wipes the rain off a nearby chair and plants himself on the metal seat. Even though he knows his location, he feels lost, he's not where he needs to be and can't think of how he'll get himself to his aunt Maria's classroom, or back home. And he can't go to the hospital on his own; there would be three hundred questions. They might even start questioning his mother, which she could definitely do without.

Excerpted from All That Is Solid Melts into Air by Darragh McKeon. Copyright © 2014 by Darragh McKeon. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.