What do you think?
Rate this book
On Not Climbing Mountains
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 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
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 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
234 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 24, 2026
32 people are currently reading
420 people want to read
About the author
Claire Thomas
51 books37 followersClaire Thomas is an Australian writer. She has published short stories in various journals, including Meanjin, Island, Overland and Australian Short Stories. She has an Honours degree in English and Art History from the University of Melbourne where she is currently undertaking a PhD. Fugitive Blue is her first novel.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Read
February 20, 2026Claire Thomas has written us a novels of ideas and we love her for it. I lived in Switzerland for five years so was always going to love a read that transports me back. But this book is doing a lot more. We encounter writers, visual artists and explorers as our protagonist travels across Switzerland by train. Thomas uses vignettes to give us glimpses and snippets of lives, history, moments to great effect. If you need plot to drive a narrative, this might not be the book for you. But if you’re comfortable to sit and think and observe then the rewards of this book are profound and impactful.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
On Not Climbing Mountains is the third novel by Australian author Claire Thomas. I read and enjoyed her previous book The Performance and I definitely also enjoyed this book.
This is not a straightforward book though. It was richly literary. Thomas has taken such a unique approach to the writing, peppering the story with thoughts and musings on a huge variety of artists and authors and cultural references. It is set throughout Switzerland and the narrator is taking a pilgrimage of sorts through her father's home country after he has passed away.
On Not Climbing Mountains is not a linear story. It's told in an almost vignette style with each chapter both speaking to the narrator’s journey but also providing commentary on a cultural figure relevant to the location.
One of the blurbs says it braids stories of artists, writers and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. I honestly can’t think of a more poetic way to describe what Thomas has done here. A wholly unique way to tell a story.
The writing is beautiful, quiet and so layered. In the space between the words the narrator’s grief at the recent death of her father and the loss of her mother as a child is palpable.
Given the limited plot, this won’t be for everyone but I’d recommend giving it a go to experience some very beautiful writing and the opportunity to quietly think about life. I’m feeling a Stella Prize longlisting is potential!
Thank you @hachetteaus for my #gifted copy.
This is not a straightforward book though. It was richly literary. Thomas has taken such a unique approach to the writing, peppering the story with thoughts and musings on a huge variety of artists and authors and cultural references. It is set throughout Switzerland and the narrator is taking a pilgrimage of sorts through her father's home country after he has passed away.
On Not Climbing Mountains is not a linear story. It's told in an almost vignette style with each chapter both speaking to the narrator’s journey but also providing commentary on a cultural figure relevant to the location.
One of the blurbs says it braids stories of artists, writers and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. I honestly can’t think of a more poetic way to describe what Thomas has done here. A wholly unique way to tell a story.
The writing is beautiful, quiet and so layered. In the space between the words the narrator’s grief at the recent death of her father and the loss of her mother as a child is palpable.
Given the limited plot, this won’t be for everyone but I’d recommend giving it a go to experience some very beautiful writing and the opportunity to quietly think about life. I’m feeling a Stella Prize longlisting is potential!
Thank you @hachetteaus for my #gifted copy.
Read
March 13, 20262026 is being heralded as the year of the physical. Finally! The idea of more face-to-face time couldn’t come sooner. Phone-free experience! Days spent with loved ones! After several centuries of happy physicality, is the algorithm’s brief siren-call gracefully fading?
The narrator of Claire Thomas’s third novel certainly has her fingers crossed. Following the death of her widowed Swiss schoolteacher father in a road accident, Beatrice Angst returns to his homeland. Forbidding herself from her phone, sick of relying upon “digital maps and slick apps”, she travels, like Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, with a Baedeker travel guide.
Happy to substitute certain technologies for others, Angst treats the Baedeker reverently, enamoured of its print, its status as a “tangible object”. Yet for those of Forster’s era, the Baedeker itself was not so different from the apps of today – a mediated representation of people and locations that placed the impressionable tourist at a remove from the (potentially threatening) flesh-and-blood of life.
Thus the form of On Not Climbing Mountains offers, like a series of gallery installations, its own modes of mediation. Each chapter reflects on artists and figures connected to Switzerland – among them James Baldwin and Charlie Chaplin, Rilke and Patricia Highsmith – via Angst’s narration. Moving back and forth across time and place, Angst relays the details of films, biographies, artworks, histories and written texts as though they were alive and present, providing a kind of analogue to the style of the chapters themselves, each of which the reader wanders through alongside Angst. It is not so much what each chapter means as what it does, creating an experience that the reader, like Angst herself, participates in as an observer, someone who seems to live the experience and yet nonetheless exists at a decided remove from it.
It’s a curious mission: transform mediated experience into something like direct experience. Narrating the work of others becomes a way for Angst, after her father’s passing, to discover “occasional moments of illumination”. Angst’s self-consideration, too, is sometimes filtered through different kinds of media: when she reflects on her childhood and schooling, it is not only via memory but via the scrapbooks and photos she discovers in her father’s study. Angst herself leads a peculiarly solitary existence; we do not learn her name until almost halfway through the book when an uncle addresses her.
Angst confesses “earnestly developing an obsession with literature” at fifteen. Decades later, many of the narratives Angst relays concern youth or childhood: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi; Fleur Jaeggy’s boarding-school novel Sweet Days of Discipline. Yet, Angst’s father is a vague presence, as is her mother. A few weeks before her father’s death, she breaks up with a lover. Single since, she declares herself an “adult orphan” for whom “solitary thinking” is vital. The personal declaration provides context for her introspection, her recurring memories of childhood and personal isolation, many of which are juxtaposed with fears of losing her connection to art, whether in the form of literary achievement (she feels a degree of personal anxiety surrounding artistic longevity), or simply in the desire to find and dedicate herself to a satisfying life of the mind.
Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
The narrator of Claire Thomas’s third novel certainly has her fingers crossed. Following the death of her widowed Swiss schoolteacher father in a road accident, Beatrice Angst returns to his homeland. Forbidding herself from her phone, sick of relying upon “digital maps and slick apps”, she travels, like Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, with a Baedeker travel guide.
Happy to substitute certain technologies for others, Angst treats the Baedeker reverently, enamoured of its print, its status as a “tangible object”. Yet for those of Forster’s era, the Baedeker itself was not so different from the apps of today – a mediated representation of people and locations that placed the impressionable tourist at a remove from the (potentially threatening) flesh-and-blood of life.
Thus the form of On Not Climbing Mountains offers, like a series of gallery installations, its own modes of mediation. Each chapter reflects on artists and figures connected to Switzerland – among them James Baldwin and Charlie Chaplin, Rilke and Patricia Highsmith – via Angst’s narration. Moving back and forth across time and place, Angst relays the details of films, biographies, artworks, histories and written texts as though they were alive and present, providing a kind of analogue to the style of the chapters themselves, each of which the reader wanders through alongside Angst. It is not so much what each chapter means as what it does, creating an experience that the reader, like Angst herself, participates in as an observer, someone who seems to live the experience and yet nonetheless exists at a decided remove from it.
It’s a curious mission: transform mediated experience into something like direct experience. Narrating the work of others becomes a way for Angst, after her father’s passing, to discover “occasional moments of illumination”. Angst’s self-consideration, too, is sometimes filtered through different kinds of media: when she reflects on her childhood and schooling, it is not only via memory but via the scrapbooks and photos she discovers in her father’s study. Angst herself leads a peculiarly solitary existence; we do not learn her name until almost halfway through the book when an uncle addresses her.
Angst confesses “earnestly developing an obsession with literature” at fifteen. Decades later, many of the narratives Angst relays concern youth or childhood: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi; Fleur Jaeggy’s boarding-school novel Sweet Days of Discipline. Yet, Angst’s father is a vague presence, as is her mother. A few weeks before her father’s death, she breaks up with a lover. Single since, she declares herself an “adult orphan” for whom “solitary thinking” is vital. The personal declaration provides context for her introspection, her recurring memories of childhood and personal isolation, many of which are juxtaposed with fears of losing her connection to art, whether in the form of literary achievement (she feels a degree of personal anxiety surrounding artistic longevity), or simply in the desire to find and dedicate herself to a satisfying life of the mind.
Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
3.5 rounded up because the prose is crystalline.
Thomas pays attention to the poetics of her sentences so there's a clarity to the images laid down in her carefully chosen words. I like careful writing, I like the gleam of polished work and this is certainly polished. (I was going to say ‘bleached’ but that won’t really work with all the glass and ice metaphors I intend to employ).
Over 75 (let’s call them) episodes, our narrator Beatrice describes her present day travels to Switzerland, her father’s birth country. Beatrice is emotionally adrift (frozen?) and engages with the country primarily on an intellectual and aesthetic level. Using a 1891 14th edition of Baedeker's Switzerland, she navigates the villages of the different Swiss cantons where stories emerge from the histories Beatrice has either researched previously or from the exhibitions and museums she visits.
I really love novels that play with structure. This one follows a series of segments strung along a single thread with links between them; sometimes a memory, an association, sometimes the connection has to be looked for, or inferred, sometimes clever, sometimes tenuous. Between Beatrice’s arrival and departure, Thomas threads a sequence of facts, observations and discoveries about the history of the different towns and their more celebrated inhabitants from writers like James Baldwin, to Mary Shelley, to Elizabeth von Arnim with a cast of poets, painters, biologists, explorers, engineers etc. appearing in the small windows of the book’s volets—miniature worlds which are as informative as they are charming.
I did have some frustration about an absence of earthiness, of life and blood and messiness. And perhaps this is the author's point. By removing feeling, by conjuring remoteness, we do not touch the mountains preferring to keep them in perspective, in our sights, unscaled. Heavy-handed, perhaps, as a metaphor but it does work well for Thomas. That said, I come back to the weight of it, or the lack of weight, of real substance. Much like Beatrice’s wish to remain untethered, I felt this novel could just have floated away up to the lofty peaks for want of grounding matter. A bit like eating snow, insubstantial. And now I am going to ruin that metaphor with the following: I think the remoteness that Thomas conjures makes this a novel of observations, a cabinet of curiosities, if you like, safe in its little glass case in the museum. As such, it stands.
Now back to flesh and blood. There is, in fact, a beating heart. Amongst the rather dreary experiences of our narrator, one episode does resuscitate this otherwise pretty bloodless but very elegant, preserved-in-ice body—and that is Beatrice’s meeting with her uncle Carl, so like her father. Here the text breathes a little, there is a glow, the colour palette turns to yellows and oranges. Here there is connection and warmth. Glaciers could almost melt.
My thanks to Hachette Australia for the uncorrected advance copy.
Thomas pays attention to the poetics of her sentences so there's a clarity to the images laid down in her carefully chosen words. I like careful writing, I like the gleam of polished work and this is certainly polished. (I was going to say ‘bleached’ but that won’t really work with all the glass and ice metaphors I intend to employ).
Over 75 (let’s call them) episodes, our narrator Beatrice describes her present day travels to Switzerland, her father’s birth country. Beatrice is emotionally adrift (frozen?) and engages with the country primarily on an intellectual and aesthetic level. Using a 1891 14th edition of Baedeker's Switzerland, she navigates the villages of the different Swiss cantons where stories emerge from the histories Beatrice has either researched previously or from the exhibitions and museums she visits.
I really love novels that play with structure. This one follows a series of segments strung along a single thread with links between them; sometimes a memory, an association, sometimes the connection has to be looked for, or inferred, sometimes clever, sometimes tenuous. Between Beatrice’s arrival and departure, Thomas threads a sequence of facts, observations and discoveries about the history of the different towns and their more celebrated inhabitants from writers like James Baldwin, to Mary Shelley, to Elizabeth von Arnim with a cast of poets, painters, biologists, explorers, engineers etc. appearing in the small windows of the book’s volets—miniature worlds which are as informative as they are charming.
I did have some frustration about an absence of earthiness, of life and blood and messiness. And perhaps this is the author's point. By removing feeling, by conjuring remoteness, we do not touch the mountains preferring to keep them in perspective, in our sights, unscaled. Heavy-handed, perhaps, as a metaphor but it does work well for Thomas. That said, I come back to the weight of it, or the lack of weight, of real substance. Much like Beatrice’s wish to remain untethered, I felt this novel could just have floated away up to the lofty peaks for want of grounding matter. A bit like eating snow, insubstantial. And now I am going to ruin that metaphor with the following: I think the remoteness that Thomas conjures makes this a novel of observations, a cabinet of curiosities, if you like, safe in its little glass case in the museum. As such, it stands.
Now back to flesh and blood. There is, in fact, a beating heart. Amongst the rather dreary experiences of our narrator, one episode does resuscitate this otherwise pretty bloodless but very elegant, preserved-in-ice body—and that is Beatrice’s meeting with her uncle Carl, so like her father. Here the text breathes a little, there is a glow, the colour palette turns to yellows and oranges. Here there is connection and warmth. Glaciers could almost melt.
My thanks to Hachette Australia for the uncorrected advance copy.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I've been eagerly waiting for Claire Thomas to publish a follow up to my beloved Performance. On Not Climbing Mountains is about a woman on holiday in Switzerland, looking at mountains, and thinking about stuff. That's it, that's the whole book!
Even though there is absolutely nothing in this book, it is still strangely compelling. The vignettes about mountainous history are exquisitely written, and somehow I was completely caught up in the writing. I don't know if I recommend this widely, but I absolutely recommend it narrowly.
Even though there is absolutely nothing in this book, it is still strangely compelling. The vignettes about mountainous history are exquisitely written, and somehow I was completely caught up in the writing. I don't know if I recommend this widely, but I absolutely recommend it narrowly.
March 15, 2026
Contemplative, but with a specificity of language that leaves you always understanding exactly what emotional phenomena Thomas is describing. I love a novel that leaves you with more knowledge than you began with, and I doubly love a novel that is clear with its world-view, such that you can almost feel the palpating heart of the author through the pages.
A must-read.
A must-read.
March 11, 2026
Oh gosh this was such an interesting book! I adored the intersection of grief and facts split into different sections focusing on different mountains. There was something truly comforting as each story because connected to another. It really felt like a warm hug.
March 14, 2026
*3.5 stars*
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews