Rooms for Vanishing

A Novel

By: Stuart Nadler

Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy, Bruce Mann, Kathleen Gati, Mark Bramhall

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

Most Anticipated by LitHub and Our Culture

“Dazzling... Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters’ sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Nadler masterfully weaves ghosts, memories, and the exciting yet terrifying possibility they all feel at the prospect of seeing each other again into this oblique, unsettling, and profound exploration of trauma, grief, and familial bonds.”—Booklist

“[A]n epic puzzle box of a novel, exploring the profoundly destabilizing power of grief and loss.”—Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"