Rooms for Vanishing
21 August 2025Synopsis
When one's heart breaks, that is life getting in. Life making room.
A heart-stopping family epic of grief and hope, and one family blown apart – across the globe, across time, across parallel possibilities – by war.
For the Alterman family, Fania and Arnold, and their children Sonja and Moses, the universe has been fractured.
In 1938 Sonja is lifted onto a Kindertransport train that will take her from Nazi-occupied Austria to London. She is the only member of her family to survive.
In 1966 Fania works as a massage therapist in Montreal, a place that has provided her safe haven after she lost her entire family in the war.
In 2016 Arnold lives out the last of his days and the last memories he has of his family in the city he has always called home.
And in 2000, Moses awaits the birth of his grandson, unaware that the strings that tie him to his past are being drawn tighter and tighter.
Surely none of these realities co-exist, and yet they seem to be drawing closer . . .
Moving between Vienna and Prague, London and Montreal, New York and Miami, Stuart Nadler's Rooms for Vanishing is a spellbinding exploration of what might happen when grief and hope collide.
Details
21 August 2025
9781035061235Reviews
Nadler is a genius. Rooms for Vanishing is the book of my dreamsSabrina Orah Mark
Stuart Nadler was already one of the most intelligent, precise, and profound writers of our generation. With Rooms for Vanishing his gift ascends to an astonishing new heightClaire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
Reading Rooms for Vanishing feels like peering into a small window and discovering the whole universe. Past and present, what is missing and what is here, the finite facts and the infinite truth. This is a novel that aches with the possibility of retrieving what was lost, of seeing in body what exists so clearly in the heartRamona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
Life-affirming and death-drenched, devastating and delightful . . . Rooms for Vanishing is a phantasmagorical portrait of violence and time, a detailed and patient cosmology of ghosts . . . I wept, real tears, at least seven times reading this novel, and I intend to return to these pages oftenMoriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World
