Rooms for Vanishing

A Novel

By: Stuart Nadler

A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds

Everyone had been survived into different futures and I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.

In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.

Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband, who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelgänger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend; and, finally, Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her.

Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing is a singular work that explores how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.

©2025 Stuart Nadler (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“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

“With masterful precision and an eye flecked with mysticism, Nadler gently peels the first layer off the world, loosens the voices that roam underneath, and from a place so far away it might be an afterlife he writes these voices back from oblivion. Nadler is a genius. Rooms for Vanishing is the book of my dreams.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily, Wild Milk, and others

“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