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

Ignazio's eyes met the boy's. He felt a surge of—what? fear? fascination? shame? It struck him, then—the obvious and unthinkable fact that he was in a strange land, worlds and worlds and long blue worlds away from home. His ribs tightened inside him. He longed for his only friend. He searched, pushing past women's wide baskets and sailors' hard smiles, until he finally found him, smoking a cigarette (how had he found one?) and leaning nonchalantly against a stucco wall. "Don't worry," Pietro said. "We'll get used to it." He laughed. "Here, have a smoke. What do you say we find a place to eat, a woman or two? We can think about jobs and rooms in the morning."

He slapped Ignazio's back, and they began to navigate the brackish din of Montevideo.

Monte. Vide. Eu. I see a mountain, said a Portuguese man, among the first Europeans to sight this terrain from sea. Monte. Vide. Eu. But Ignazio saw no mountain at all, just flat, cobbled streets.

Monte. Vide. Eu. City of sailors and workers, of wool and steak, of gray stones and long nights, biting-cold winters and Januaries so humid you could swim through hot air. City of seekers. Port of a hundred flags. Heart and edge of Uruguay.

It was El Cerro they'd been talking about. Those Portuguese. They had glimpsed El Cerro from their ship, and spawned the city's name.

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.