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