LITERATURE + LECTURES

Blue Willow Bookshop presents  Carolina DeRobertis.  Join us as we welcome Carolina De Robertis, who will be here to discuss and sign her debut novel, The Invisible Mountain. The staff members who have read it all agree that it will make a fabulous book club selection!

At once expansive and lush with detail, this debut novel is an intimate exploration of the search for love and authenticity, power and redemption, in the lives of three women, and a penetrating portrait of a small, tenacious nation, Uruguay, shaken in the gales of the twentieth century.



On the first day of the century, a small town gathers to witness a miracle and unravel its portents: the mysterious reappearance of a lost infant, Pajarita. Later, as a young woman in the capital city—Montevideo, brimming with growth and promise—Pajarita begins a lineage of independent women. Her daughter Eva, intent on becoming a poet, overcomes an early, shattering betrayal to embark on a most unconventional path toward personal and artistic fulfillment. And Eva’s daughter Salomé, awakening to both her sensuality and political convictions amidst the violent turmoil of the late 1960s, finds herself dangerously attracted to a cadre of urban guerilla rebels.

From Perón’s glittering Buenos Aires to the rustic hills of Rio de Janeiro, from the haven of a Montevideo butchershop to U.S. embassy halls, The Invisible Mountain celebrates a nation’s spirit, the will to survive in the most desperate of circumstances, and the fierce and complex connections between mother and daughter.

Carolina De Robertis grew up in an Uruguayan family that immigrated to England, Switzerland, and California. The Invisible Mountain, her first novel, will be published in the U.S. in August 2009, and is also forthcoming in fifteen other countries and eleven languages. Her fiction and literary translations have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, ColorLines, and Zoetrope: Allstory, among others. Her translation of the contemporary Chilean novella Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra, was named one of the Ten Best Translated Books of 2008 by the journal Three Percent. Prior to completing her first book, she worked in women’s rights organizations for ten years, on issues ranging from rape to immigration. She currently lives in Oakland, California, where she is at work on her second novel, about a young Argentinian woman who discovers an explosive secret linking her origins to the disappearances of the 1970s.