Rooms for Vanishing

Stuart Nadler

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English

Picador
25 March 2025

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Sagas; Historical fiction; Fiction: special features; The Holocaust

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, Fania is working as a massage therapist in Montreal, a country that provided her safe haven after she lost her entire family in the Second World War. And yet there are strange echoes, impressions, of those she loves everywhere she turns. Has she lost her mind or is her family still alive?

In twenty-first-century Vienna, Arnold receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be his long-lost daughter, Sonja. Daring to believe that she survived, Arnold waits for her at the train station.

Finally, in New York, 2002, Moses is haunted by the ghost of his best friend who was killed in the Prague Spring, and who exhorts Moses to return to Prague to make peace for the dead.

Moving from the Second World War to 2016, between Vienna and Prague, London and Montreal, New York and Miami, Rooms for Vanishing is the story of a family blown apart and across the globe by war. They each believe that they are the sole survivor, and maybe they are, because this is a novel of maybe-lived lives, parallel worlds and possibilities, and one populated by ghosts. Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the collisions between desire and reality, memory and facts; it is a singular work that masterfully reimagines the lost possibilities of history itself.

By: Stuart Nadler
Imprint: Picador
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 37mm
Weight: 564g
ISBN: 9781035061211
ISBN 10: 103506121X
Pages: 464
Publication Date: 25 March 2025
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of two novels, Wise Men and The Inseparables, and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. He lives in New England, USA.

Reviews for Rooms for Vanishing

Dazzling . . . Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters’ sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder -- <i>Publishers Weekly</i> (starred review) [A]n epic puzzle box of a novel, exploring the profoundly destabilizing power of grief and loss -- <i>Lit Hub</i> ""Most Anticipated Books of 2025""