Rooms For Vanishing

Rooms For Vanishing by Stuart Nadler

A mesmerizing, mind-bending epic about a Jewish family from Vienna torn apart by the violence of war—Rooms for Vanishing delves into the heavy weight of exile and how grief distorts our sense of the impossible.

The Altermans, survivors of a fractured world, live in separate futures, unable to reunite, despite hearing each other’s lives from afar. The novel spans decades and continents, tracing each family member’s struggle with loss and the belief that they are the last survivor. Sonja, the daughter, searches for her missing husband in London; Fania, the mother, encounters a doppelgänger in a Montreal hotel basement; Moses, the son, is haunted by the ghost of his best friend, returning to Prague to make peace with the past; and Arnold, the father, dares to hope his long-lost daughter might be alive after receiving a mysterious message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her. 

Through their journeys, Rooms for Vanishing explores how, in the depths of grief and loss, the boundary between reality and desire begins to blur, and ghosts, for a fleeting moment, become real. Spellbinding and deeply profound, this novel is a singular exploration of magic, impossible hope, and the fragile nature of history.