The prose is serpentine and exciting as it takes the scenic route to nowhere. There is a compliment in that. Her writing sets out to be majestic, and it is, like an overflowing soufflé.

The most unforgettable scenes in the novel are the intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombia’s long history of violence. Engel’s capacity to dive deep into history and folklore extends also into her narration of the life of Talia’s father and the family patriarch, Mauro.

The novel captures the romance of the immigrants’ first days in America with a visceral tenderness. Their skin darkens in the Texan sun. They see the ocean for the first time. I feel sorry for their lost youth, then angry at their gullibility.

This is a compulsively readable novel that will make you feel the oxytocin of comfort and delusion.

The ending reads like child-of-immigrant fan fiction. I’d hire Engel to ghostwrite my nightmares.

Patricia Engel’s novels don’t begin so much as they crack open. Consider the first line of the Miami writer’s 2010 debut, “Vida”: “It was the year my uncle got arrested for killing his wife, and our family was the subject of all the town gossip.” The start of 2016’s “The Veins of the Ocean” presents a man, maddened by his wife’s infidelity, who takes their toddler son to a bridge, lifts the boy “as high in the sky as he’d go” and throws him into Biscayne Bay. The child survives. The father is dead by the third page.

“Infinite Country,” Engel’s latest novel, leads with another surprising act of violence. At a reformatory in the Colombian mountains, a group of girls, “some of whom were murderers on the verge,” lure a nun into their room with cries of “Fire!,” subdue her and escape. The mastermind of this plot is 15-year-old Talia, an American born to Colombian immigrants and sentenced to the prison school after she burned a man in Bogotá with hot oil as revenge for a murdered cat.

A gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners, Engel understands that the threat of violence is a constant in people’s lives and that emotional acts of abuse can be as harmful as physical ones. In “Infinite Country,” she focuses on the psychological injury that results when families are “split as if by an ax” for political or economic reasons.

“Infinite Country” falters only when, late in the book, Engel hands over the narration to Karina and Nando in a well-intentioned if discordant gesture to bring these previously unexamined characters into the foreground. The siblings — one an American citizen, the other undocumented — have important things to say about what Karina calls “the United States of Diasporica,” but the shift in perspective and a surprise twist deflate what had been airtight storytelling.

It’s not a fatal error. Engel brings the story of Elena and Mauro, and that of Talia’s quest for freedom, to a satisfying close. And in literature, as in life, the question of citizenship, of what it means to belong to a country and to have a country belong to you, remains unresolved. “I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer,” Karina says, “or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.”