Description

‘I wept, real tears, at least seven times reading this novel, and I intend to return to these pages often’ – Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World

For fans of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Rooms for Vanishing is an epic novel 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.

Publisher Review

Nadler is a genius. Rooms for Vanishing is the book of my dreams — Sabrina 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 height — Claire 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 heart — Ramona 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 often — Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World