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

Sooner or later they’re going to notice.

Sooner or later I’m going to leave a yellow stain in the snow and they’ll all make fun of me.

One of the parents went up to Eric and asked if the fog wasn’t too thick to go all the way to the top that morning. Alice pricked up her ears hopefully, but Eric unfurled his perfect smile.

“It’s only foggy down here,” he said. “At the top the sun is blind­ing. Come on, let’s go.”

On the chairlift Alice was paired with Giuliana, the daughter of one of her father’s colleagues. They didn’t say a word the whole way up. Not that they particularly disliked each other, it was just that, at that moment, neither of them wanted to be there.

The sound of the wind sweeping the summit of the mountain was punctuated by the metallic rush of the steel cable from which Alice and Giuliana were hanging, their chins tucked into the collars of their jackets so as to warm themselves with their breath.

It’s only the cold, you don’t really need to go, Alice said to her­self.

But the closer she got to the top, the more the pin in her belly pierced her flesh. Maybe she was seriously close to wetting herself. Then again, it might even be something bigger. No, it’s just the cold, you don’t really need to go again, Alice kept telling herself.

Alice suddenly regurgitated rancid milk. She swallowed it down with disgust.

She really needed to go; she was desperate.

Two more chairlifts before the shelter. I can’t possibly hold it in for that long.

Giuliana lifted the safety bar and they both shifted their bottoms forward to get off. When her skis touched the ground Alice shoved off from her seat. You couldn’t see more than two yards ahead of you, so much for blinding sun. It was like being wrapped in a sheet, all white, nothing but white, above, below, all around you. It was the exact opposite of darkness, but it frightened Alice in precisely the same way.

She slipped off to the side of the trail to look for a little pile of fresh snow to relieve herself in. Her stomach gurgled like a dish­washer. When she turned around, she couldn’t see Giuliana anymore, which meant that Giuliana couldn’t see her either. She herringboned a few yards up the hill, just as her father had made her do when he had gotten it into his head to teach her to ski. Up and down the bunny slope, thirty, forty times a day, sidestep up and snowplow down. Buying a ski pass for just one slope was a waste of money, and this way you trained your legs as well.

Alice unfastened her skis and took a few more steps, sinking halfway up her calves in the snow. Finally she could sit. She stopped holding her breath and relaxed her muscles. A pleasant electric shock spread through her whole body, finally settling in the tips of her toes.

It must have been the milk, of course. That and the fact that her bum was freezing from sitting in the snow at six thousand feet. It had never happened before, at least not as far as she could remember. Never, not even once.

But this time it wasn’t pee. Or, not only. As she leaped to her feet she felt something heavy in the seat of her pants and instinctively touched her bottom. She couldn’t feel a thing through her gloves, but it didn’t matter—she had already realized what had hap­pened.

Now what, she wondered.

Eric called her but Alice didn’t reply. As long as she stayed up there, the fog would hide her. She could pull down her ski pants and clean herself up as best she could, or go down and whisper in Eric’s ear what had happened. She could tell him she had to go back to the lodge, that her knees hurt. Or she could just not worry about it and keep skiing, making sure to always be last in line.

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.