On Not Climbing Mountains

Image credit: Amazon.com.au

After my recent fantasy deep-dive and then the overly cosy outings with Michiko Aoyama, this month’s Bookclub read was a welcome change of pace that I didn’t know I needed. Isn’t that a lovely thing: when a decision is made for you at precisely the right time that you would be ready for it? This month, we are looking at Claire Thomas’ On Not Climbing Mountains, a book about seemingly everything and nothing that is written in a way that just inspires you to think about the world: its narratives, its landscapes, and its interconnectivity.

Schoolteacher Beatrice Angst arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey across the country of her father’s birth. He has recently passed away and Beatrice wishes to grieve, to be outside of time, alone with her thoughts and her loss, but as she travels across Switzerland she cannot help but get swept up in the stories that all around her. Mary Shelley, Charlie Chaplin, Fleur Jaeggy, Patricia Highsmith, Vladamir Nabokov, Lenin, Sir Edmund Hailary, Casanova – they are all with her on this journey, tied together by a beautiful, mountainous landscape.

Madeline Gray best sums up this incredibly moving novel in her front-cover review: “Thomas has written a novel that is truly novel – braiding stories of artists, writers, and thinkings into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind.”

Indeed, the book begins as a collection of individual life-stories and anecdotes of famous and recognisable historical figures, as well as a few unheard-of heroes, with nothing in common aside from their presence in this landscape at one time or another. Written simply while also being engaging enough to inspire one to hop onto Google and learn what they can about these people, On Not Climbing Mountains is one of those rare books that gently massages the part of your mind where ambitions are kept, stimulating inspiration to learn more about bees, read Frankenstein, go to an art gallery, and watch Modern Times.

It is only about a third of the way through that we are properly introduced to the main character and the circumstances that bring her to this place that inspires such stories and trains of thought. From there the book is… everything. It’s fiction, it’s a bunch of biographies, it’s a review of art, literature, and film, it’s an environmental, historical, and poetical study on mountains, it’s a series of tales interconnected across time. It’s beautiful.

And the prose throughout is written with this gorgeously genuine and admiring tone that provides insight into who this protagonist is. It’s unidentifiable to me but there is something about Thomas’ writing that is raw and genuine, which makes this book feel so intimate even though it’s nonchalantly telling a bunch of tiny stories that have nothing to do with the heroine, other than be about people or books or films that she’s enjoyed or been interested in.

Image credit: About- Claire Thomas

I absolutely loved this book and the way that it made me feel. It’s a novel that promises everything and nothing. That somehow manages to envelope you so totally that you’ve traversed half of it before registering what it’s about and what it’s exploring. It’s both melancholy and jubilant, a lament and a celebration of humanity’s achievements: art, science, philosophy, politics, invention, curiosity, brutality, conquering the physical world, and being left to slowly die in it. On Not Climbing Mountains is moving, profound, soothing, and fascinating. The literary equivalent of being carried by a small current in a quiet beach on a cloudless day.

Author: Clair Thomas, 2026

Published: Hachette Australia, Australia & New Zealand, 2026