Adrian Duncan's fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, is reviewed as a bold literary exploration of philosophical bafflement, weaving together the story of Catherine, an academically gifted Irish girl who becomes an Oxford professor, and Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic whose character draws on the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The review praises the novel for making readers experience genuine mystification about the universe without frustration, arguing this is a rare and difficult literary feat that succeeds through careful structure and prose rather than obscurity.

The novel alternates between 1923, when six-year-old Catherine's gifts emerge as her father's farm fails, and 1951, when she reunites with the dying Alois in Scotland; it references real philosophers including GE Moore, Gottlob Frege and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and includes diagrams and algebraic logic passages alongside recurring images of small, mysterious spaces. The reviewer situates the book within Duncan's wider body of work, from his debut Love Notes from a German Building Site to The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, noting its blend of realist Irish rural detail with a more cerebral European sensibility concerned with philosophy, architecture, madness and exile, comparing Catherine's dignified sadness to a William Trevor character.