Rooms for Vanishing

By: Stuart Nadler

Each member of the Alterman family is certain they are the only one to have survived the war. But their story is one of maybe-lived lives, parallel worlds and possibilities, and one populated by ghosts . . .

In the summer of 1938, Sonja is lifted onto a Kindertransport train that will take her from Nazi-occupied Austria to London. She leaves behind her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses. She is the only member of her family to survive.

In 1966, her mother 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 Vienna, Arnold lives out the last of his days in the city he has always called home.

And in 2000, while Moses awaits the birth of his grandson in New York, he is visited by the ghosts of his past.

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 the story of a family blown apart by war. Spellbinding and profound, it explores what might happen when grief and hope collide, in a masterful reimagining of the lost possibilities of history itself.

©2025 Stuart Nadler (P)2025 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

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)