Over the past month, the world has watched with awe the tremendous feats of athletes at the 2026 Winter Olympics, many of which involve risky mountain sports.

Meanwhile, a man was found guilty of manslaughter after his girlfriend froze to death on Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain. Two young men were found dead after they went missing while hiking on Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. Mountains in Europe and the United States have also claimed several lives during a particularly heavy snow season.

Review: On Not Climbing Mountains – Claire Thomas (Hachette)

After reading Claire Thomas’s latest novel, the extraordinary and experimental On Not Climbing Mountains, these stories of the mountains have captured my attention. Thomas’s narrative is itself a series of mountain scenes: beside mountains, on mountains, near mountains, looking at mountains, inspired by mountains, living and dying on mountains – but not climbing them.

One such vignette describes the childhood of mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, though not the details of his expeditions.

On Not Climbing Mountains is Thomas’s third novel. Her first, Fugitive Blue (2008) won the Dobbie Award for Women Writers. Her second, The Performance (2021), was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Both were longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Using Baedeker’s Switzerland, a 19th-century guidebook to the region, as its structure, On Not Climbing Mountains moves through five parts, and five areas of Switzerland and their surrounds. In doing so, the novel spotlights the significance of the Swiss Alps to a wide range of authors, scientists, historians, artists and others.

The effect is to capture the ways our lives perpetually touch and move on from those of others, and the experience of a........

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