Claire Thomas – författare

From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning author of The Performance and Fugitive Blue comes a remarkable work of literary fictionA 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. 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. ''Incandescent with ideas. One of the best books by an Australian writer I''ve read in a long time. A magisterially good book'' THE BOOKSHELF - ABC RADIO NATIONAL''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''A book of images, resonances, memory, and the mingling of art and life that becomes something beautiful and tender'' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD''Told aslant with a beautiful lightness of touch . . . There is a sense, throughout, of the author just behind the scenes, in tight control of her material; of history churning beneath her prose'' THE GUARDIAN''A beautifully meditative, intensely lyrical book, and its approach to narrative is innovative and exciting'' SATURDAY PAPER''Both vast and intimate . . . A tender, intelligent, and moving novel'' AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW''Extraordinary and experimental'' THE CONVERSATION''Thomas has an archivist''s curiosity and a novelist''s ear, and the result is a work that feels both precise and associative. She invites the reader to look harder, and then again and again. It''s not quite memoir, not quite history, not quite criticism, not quite fiction, but something tautly stitched between all three'' BOOKS+PUBLISHINGPraise for The Performance ''Flawless'' WASHINGTON POST ''Compassionate'' NEW YORK TIMES ''Transformational'' THE TIMES ''The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius'' THE GUARDIAN

I am not writing this to be sentimental. I am just trying to find an answer to a story...An artistic girl in Renaissance Venice, quietly rebelling against the constraints of her gender. A young milordi on a European Grand Tour, recognising the world and his secret sexuality. A ballerina in nineteenth-century Paris, choosing between suitors. A Greek mother, beginning a new life with her family in a migrant reception centre in regional Australia. And, finally, a paintings conservator in contemporary Melbourne, breaking her own heart.A single, small artwork - subversive, hidden, and oddly blue - somehow survives for five hundred years, linking the lives of these characters. An intricate tale of grief and discovery, of watery destruction and earthly love.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization.Each chapter concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. The theoretical frameworks that are used include Jackendoff’s Conceptual Structure, Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, Lieber’s lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon, Beard’s Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, and the onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other.

If you think having the devil snapping at your heels is scary, its nothing compared to finding Gods calm presence at your back every time you stop to draw breath in your race to escapeparticularly for a determined agnostic like Claire. Indeed, His presence is so unnerving and unwelcome that its not until her world crumbles to ashes that she fi nds the courage to stop running and turn toward Him. Moderately psychic and a most earthbound mystic, Claire has heard the voice of Thomas from the days of earliest childhood, but has worked tirelessly for most of her adult life to shut it out or shout it downuntil she made that fateful decision.

Entanglement is the result of that choice. It describes the pain of surviving the traumatic deaths of four beloved people, fi nding the courage to walk away from abuse and oppression, and facing the fear of being utterly alone in the world. It also explains how confronting fear, accepting loss, and embracing the unknown and the mystical can create a life of enormous joy and enrichment. It focuses on how having the courage to stay in the not-knowing can be gloriously life-affirming and on how human life on earth is vastly more mysterious than most of us dare to imagine.

''Quietly transformational''The Times ''A tour de force... I can''t recommend this too highly''Patrick Gale''Innovative... an original, at-a-sitting read''Daily Mail''A potent meditation on the intensity of women''s lives''Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend''A miracle... Engaging and evocative''Washington Post''I loved and admired The Performance... Unmissable''Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters''Lively and intimate... The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius''Guardian''Thomas writes these women with such wisdom and compassion, that by the end we are all transformed''Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.The house lights lower.The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.As the performance unfolds, so does each woman''s story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.

A unique new insight into multilingual families, this book views multilingual childhoods from the point of the child and is based on over 50 interviews with adults who grew up in multilingual settings. The book charts their recollections of their childhoods and includes many different types of families, discusses many of the common issues that arise in multilingual families, and draws examples from all over the world. The book fills a significant gap in the literature and resources available to multilingual parents. It was researched and written by a self-help group of multilingual parents and thus the book remains very practical and gives clear and realistic advice to multilingual parents facing choices or dilemmas. However, because of its unique viewpoint, this book also includes much new material that will be of interest to researchers and students of bilingualism.