Australian Competitions Club

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.
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.
 
To enter, tell us who is in the portrait on the window shutter? Answer: James Baldwin

https://goodreadingmagazine.snapforms.com.au/form/win-on-not-climbing-mountains

Terms And Conditions
1. Entry is open to all residents of Australia and New Zealand from 1 March 2026 to 31 March 2026. 2. Employees and the immediate families of the promoter and agencies associated with this promotion are ineligible. 3. The judge’s decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into. 4. The first correct entries drawn from the competition in April 2026 will win the book. 5. The promoter accepts no responsibility for late, lost or misdirected mail. 6. The winners of the prize will be notified by email in April 2026.