On Sale March 18, 2025
A prismatic, mind-bending family epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible.
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 doppelganger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend and eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; 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 Sonja. Through their stories, we come to see how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.
Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the boundary between desire and reality; this is a singular work that masterfully considers the possibility of magic, and the dangerous and impossible hope for a different history.
Praise for Rooms for Vanishing
“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
“Rooms for Vanishing is a phantasmagorical portrait of violence and time, a detailed and patient cosmology of ghosts. In it, Jewish history, the multiverse, human-made catastrophes, small moments of incandescent decency, vertiginous absurdity and naked longing all weave together . . . 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 and Sadness Is a White Bird
