Rooms for Vanishing - by Stuart Nadler (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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. 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 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 impoossible hope for a different history"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Most Anticipated by LitHub and Our Culture

"Nadler writes in a register of formal mysticism that can be pleasantly sorrowful...there are moments of deep emotion in this ambitious novel."
--New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Nadler develops this melancholy notion with care and solemnity...The novel has the beauty of a dirge."
--Wall Street Journal

"It's a multiverse of grief, and Stuart Nadler's storytelling makes each character come to life, despite their possible death(s)--a wondrous feat."
--Town & Country

"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"

" [An] ornate tapestry of a novel...One can't erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work."
--BookPage

"Through poignant moments of nar­ra­tion, Nadler expert­ly devel­ops the com­plex­i­ty of Jew­ish sur­vival, par­tic­u­lar­ly after the Holo­caust, when the dead can some­times seem as alive as the living."
--Jewish Book Council

"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

"In Rooms for Vanishing, one of Stuart Nadler's characters, a murdered poet, describes the afterlife as "an everlasting dispatch from a world in which events occur to a world where everything has already happened." This book, life-affirming and death-drenched, devastating and delightful, is, I think, a sort of mirror image to the murdered poet's portrayal: this novel feels as though it is a dispatch from a world where everything has already happened to a world, our world, where events occur. 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. Undergirding the resultant tapestry, I located a strange, excruciating sort of peace, one that arises from waiting, praying, for a different past to unspool itself into a more bearable future. Of course, it cannot do so, but the act of reading, of waiting, of praying, alongside these characters, feels somehow transformative. So this book: might it make the agonized future more bearable? I think it might. 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

About the Author

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 & Noble 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 is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in New England.