From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning author of The Performance and Fugitive Blue comes a remarkable work of literary fiction
A woman arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey through the country of her father's birth. She yearns to be outside time - untethered and alone - but she soon becomes immersed in the stories resonating all around her.
She visits a museum and stares into the oversized, disco-ball eyes of an insect, unsettled by the intimacy, 'like looking into the facial pores of a lover'. Later, she will tiptoe through the snow to find a portrait of James Baldwin on the window shutter of a chalet, his features rendered in rows of silver staples shot into timber.
She will find traces of Mary Shelley and Fleur Jaeggy; android pioneers in eighteenth-century Neuchatel; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and striking workers drilling through the earth to create the vast Gotthard Tunnel; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest; Lenin and the Dada artists in early twentieth-century Zurich.
On Not Climbing Mountains is a tender and compelling novel from the internationally acclaimed author of The Performance. Beautifully conceived and deftly crafted, it is an exhilarating feat of storytelling, concerned with the fragilities of the natural world, the pains of grief and memory, and the endless reverberations of art.
'Not climbing, waiting, connecting. Thomas has written a novel that is truly novel - she plays with form and artfully constructs a journey through the mountains of Switzerland, braiding stories of artists, writers, and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. Vivian Gornick meets Ali Smith, but unmistakably Claire Thomas' MADELEINE GRAY, AUTHOR OF GREEN DOT
Praise for The Performance
'Flawless' WASHINGTON POST
'Compassionate' NEW YORK TIMES
'Quietly transformational' THE TIMES
'Intimate, poignant, and darkly funny' SUNDAY TIMES
'The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius' THE GUARDIAN
'A near-perfect wind-up music box of a novel . . . Inventive and rule-breaking' ARTSHUB
Praise for Fugitive Blue
'Beautifully done with great imagination' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
'Immediately enticing' CANBERRA TIMES
'Polished and poignant, expressed with incisiveness and resonance, Fugitive Blue doesn't miss a beat' WESTERLY MAGAZINE
About the Author
Claire Thomas is a writer from Naarm/Melbourne. Her first novel was Fugitive Blue, which won the Dobbie Literary Award for women writers, and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Performance, also longlisted for the Miles Franklin, was internationally published to critical acclaim, and shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2022.
Claire holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has worked as a mentor, lecturer, supervisor and teacher for many years. On Not Climbing Mountains was written with the support of a residency at the Fondation Jan Michalski in Montricher, Switzerland.
