On Not Climbing Mountains

WINNER OF THE FICTION BOOK AWARD, QUEENSLAND LITERARY AWARDS 2026

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 Neuchâtel; 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. 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.

'Incandescent with ideas. One of the best books by an Australian writer I've read in a long time. A magisterially good book' THE BOOKSHELF - ABC RADIO NATIONAL

'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

'A book of images, resonances, memory, and the mingling of art and life that becomes something beautiful and tender' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'Told aslant with a beautiful lightness of touch . . . There is a sense, throughout, of the author just behind the scenes, in tight control of her material; of history churning beneath her prose' THE GUARDIAN

'A beautifully meditative, intensely lyrical book, and its approach to narrative is innovative and exciting' SATURDAY PAPER

'Both vast and intimate . . . A tender, intelligent, and moving novel' AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

'Extraordinary and experimental' THE CONVERSATION

'Thomas has an archivist's curiosity and a novelist's ear, and the result is a work that feels both precise and associative. She invites the reader to look harder, and then again and again. It's not quite memoir, not quite history, not quite criticism, not quite fiction, but something tautly stitched between all three' BOOKS+PUBLISHING

Praise for The Performance

'Flawless' WASHINGTON POST

'Compassionate' NEW YORK TIMES

'Transformational' THE TIMES

'The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius' THE GUARDIAN