Excerpt from The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Instead she simply stayed where she was, careful not to move a muscle, shielded by the fog.

Eric called her again. Louder now.

“She must have gone to the ski lift already, silly girl,” a little boy said.

Alice could hear them talking. Someone said let’s go and someone else said I’m cold from standing here. They could be just below her, a few yards away, or up at the ski lift. Sounds are deceptive: they rebound off the mountains and sink in the snow. “Damn . . . let’s go see,” Eric said. Alice slowly counted to ten, suppressing her urge to vomit as she felt something slither down her thighs. When she got to ten, she started over again, this time counting to twenty. Now all was silent.

She picked up her skis and carried them under her arm to the trail. It took her a little while to work out how to position them at right angles to the fall line. With fog that thick you can’t even tell which way you’re facing.

She clipped into her skis and tightened the bindings. She took off her goggles and spat inside them because they had misted up. She could ski down to the lodge all on her own. She didn’t care that Eric was looking for her at the top of the mountain. With her pants caked in shit, she didn’t want to stay up there a second longer than she absolutely had to. She went over the descent in her head. She had never done it alone, but, after all, they had gone only as far as the first ski lift, and she’d been down this slope dozens of times.

She began to snowplow. Just the day before, Eric had said if I see you doing one more snowplow turn, I swear I’m going to tie your ankles together.

Eric didn’t like her, she was sure of it. He thought she was a scaredy-pants and, as it turned out, events had proved him right. Eric didn’t like her father either, because every day, at the end of the lesson, he pestered him with endless questions. So how is our Alice coming along, are we getting better, do we have a little champion on our hands, when are we going to start racing, on and on. Eric always stared at a spot somewhere behind her father and answered yes, no, well . . .

Alice saw the whole scene superimposed on her foggy goggles as she gently edged her way down, unable to make out anything beyond the tips of her skis. Only when she ended up in the fresh snow did she understand that it was time to turn.

She started singing to herself to feel less alone. From time to time she wiped away her snot with her glove.

Keep your weight uphill, plant your pole, turn. Lean on your boots. Now shift your body weight forward, okay? Bo-dy weight for-ward. The voice was partly Eric’s and partly her father’s.

Her father would probably fly into a rage. She had to come up with a lie, a story that would stand up, no holes or contradictions. She didn’t even dream of telling him what had really happened. The fog, that was it, blame it on the fog. She was following the others onto the big slope when her ski pass had come off her jacket. No, that’s no good, no one’s ski pass ever blew away. You’d have to be a real idiot to lose it. My scarf. My scarf blew away and I went back to find it, but the others didn’t wait for me. I called them a hundred times but there was no sign of them; they had disappeared into the fog and so I went down to look for them.

And why didn’t you go back up? her father would ask.

Of course, why hadn’t she? On second thought, it was better if she lost her ski pass. She hadn’t gone back up because she’d lost her ski pass and the man at the ski lift wouldn’t let her.

Alice smiled, pleased with her story. It was flawless. She didn’t even feel all that dirty anymore. She would spend the rest of the day in front of the TV. She would take a shower and put on clean clothes and slip her feet into her furry slippers. She would stay inside, in the warmth, all day. Or she would have, if only she’d looked up from her skis long enough to see the orange tape with the words Trail Closed. Her father was always telling her look where you’re going. If only she’d remembered that in fresh snow you shouldn’t put your body weight forward and if only Eric, a few days before, had adjusted her bindings better, and her father had been more insistent in saying but Alice weighs sixty pounds, won’t they be too tight like that?

Reprinted by arrangement with Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. Translation copyright (c) Shaun Whiteside, 2009., Copyright (c) 2008 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A.