What do you think?
Rate this book
Rooms for Vanishing
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 impossible hope for a different history.
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 impossible hope for a different history.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published March 18, 2025
94 people are currently reading
11229 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Nadler
11 books106 followersStuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he was also the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Wise Men, and the story collection The Book of Life.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews
October 21, 2024
There are a number of adjectives I could use to describe this brilliant novel: profound, thought-provoking, mind-bending, enlightening, and even dazzling. I could just as easily call it mystifying, bewildering, and enigmatic. In its style, approach, and creation, it is truly sui generis.
This prismatic epic focuses on the Altermans, a Viennese family of four. Sonja, the young daughter, is sent on the Kindertransport to Britain by her parents to keep her safe from the encroaching Nazi threat to Austrian Jews. She believes that her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses, were all murdered soon thereafter.
But did they miraculously escape, and are they really alive? Is she, in fact, alive? Or is the world a series of revisions, with God always in the process of making and unmaking it? Is our world constantly undergoing creation, destruction, and re-creation? Are we simply picked up out of history and replaced with nothing with a wall between ourselves and our lives?
At first, we believe the separate narratives that are relayed separately by each family member. Fania, Sonja’s mother, is in Montreal, paired with a man named Hermann, with whom she practices English when she chances upon her doppelganger, whose life is nearly identical to hers. Then there’s Arnold, the father, who is one year from his 100th birthday, who meets a woman he has never seen before. Within minutes of meeting her, everything, forever, becomes different for him. Baby Moses has also been allowed to grow up and is followed by the ghost of his best friend. Sonja herself is a musicologist whose husband, a conductor of some renown, goes missing in London. That is if Sonja is truly corporeal.
Each alone in their separate futures, which may or may not exist, each in a new version of themselves, and each struggling with unspeakable loss, the members of the Alterman family impossibly yearn for a future where the unspeakable has not occurred. Stuart Nadler writes, “Everyone has been survived into separate 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 never be able to cross over to meet them.”
Is that what profound grief is all about? Choosing different futures for those whom we have lost? Creating different versions of them when we are no longer able to create memories? Using our story-making powers to liberate loved ones from an undeserved history? Consistently being forced to recall that those we love are not here but vanished in rooms that make them unreachable? The author asks how it is possible to be dead and alive at the same time. “Only great geniuses have that ability. Or great monsters.” To which he might have added: “Or those whose grief twists us into believing in the impossible.”
This isn’t an easy read, but it’s well worth the effort. I owe thanks to Dutton for providing me with an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
This prismatic epic focuses on the Altermans, a Viennese family of four. Sonja, the young daughter, is sent on the Kindertransport to Britain by her parents to keep her safe from the encroaching Nazi threat to Austrian Jews. She believes that her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses, were all murdered soon thereafter.
But did they miraculously escape, and are they really alive? Is she, in fact, alive? Or is the world a series of revisions, with God always in the process of making and unmaking it? Is our world constantly undergoing creation, destruction, and re-creation? Are we simply picked up out of history and replaced with nothing with a wall between ourselves and our lives?
At first, we believe the separate narratives that are relayed separately by each family member. Fania, Sonja’s mother, is in Montreal, paired with a man named Hermann, with whom she practices English when she chances upon her doppelganger, whose life is nearly identical to hers. Then there’s Arnold, the father, who is one year from his 100th birthday, who meets a woman he has never seen before. Within minutes of meeting her, everything, forever, becomes different for him. Baby Moses has also been allowed to grow up and is followed by the ghost of his best friend. Sonja herself is a musicologist whose husband, a conductor of some renown, goes missing in London. That is if Sonja is truly corporeal.
Each alone in their separate futures, which may or may not exist, each in a new version of themselves, and each struggling with unspeakable loss, the members of the Alterman family impossibly yearn for a future where the unspeakable has not occurred. Stuart Nadler writes, “Everyone has been survived into separate 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 never be able to cross over to meet them.”
Is that what profound grief is all about? Choosing different futures for those whom we have lost? Creating different versions of them when we are no longer able to create memories? Using our story-making powers to liberate loved ones from an undeserved history? Consistently being forced to recall that those we love are not here but vanished in rooms that make them unreachable? The author asks how it is possible to be dead and alive at the same time. “Only great geniuses have that ability. Or great monsters.” To which he might have added: “Or those whose grief twists us into believing in the impossible.”
This isn’t an easy read, but it’s well worth the effort. I owe thanks to Dutton for providing me with an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
April 11, 2025
Stuart Nadler’s Rooms for Vanishing is not so much a novel as it is a requiem—a deeply immersive and sorrowfully resonant composition of a family fragmented across time, continents, and metaphysical boundaries. It is a book that does not whisper its intentions, but rather murmurs them through walls, across continents, through time, and often through the porous veil separating the living from the dead. In this latest work, Nadler (author of Wise Men, The Book of Life, and The Inseparables) takes a bold step forward in form and theme. While his earlier works explored identity, assimilation, and familial tension, Rooms for Vanishing feels like an exhalation of something far older and more mystic—a disassembled myth stitched from Jewish diaspora trauma, Holocaust memory, and the poetry of grief.
Plot Overview – Four Rooms, One Family, Infinite Ghosts
At its core, Rooms for Vanishing is the shattered mosaic of the Alterman family, Vienna-born and war-torn, their lives torn asunder by the Holocaust and scattered like ash on the wind.
- Sonja, the daughter, grieving the loss of her child Anya and the disappearance of her husband Franz, lives in a liminal space between mourning and madness.
- Fania, the mother, is haunted—sometimes literally—by the version of herself she abandoned, and the life she once held before Montreal swallowed her.
- Moses, the son, haunted by ghosts both metaphoric and spectral, returns to Prague, seeking the shadow of a friend long gone.
- Arnold, the father, living with absence as a permanent state, receives a note that might be from his long-lost daughter—and chooses to believe it.
Their narratives are nonlinear but interlinked, each character suspended in a different "room," a term Nadler uses not just spatially, but cosmically—separate existences echoing one another through memory, hallucination, and inexplicable reunions. The narrative doesn’t offer reunion so much as it offers simultaneous longing: characters imagining each other across time, space, and death.
Writing Style – A Language of Longing
Adapting a distinctly poetic and elegiac style, Nadler writes with the tremor of someone chronicling the unfilmable—the emotions too vague for visual media, too complex for speech. His prose is lyrical but intentional, and every sentence reads like it has been weighed for memory.
The voice is fragmented, reflective of the characters’ fractured identities. Sonja’s grief, especially, becomes a proxy for the Holocaust's generational trauma—personal, yet archetypal. Nadler’s genius lies in blending this voice across four characters while keeping each identity distinct. The novel reads like a chorus where each singer mourns in harmony and disharmony simultaneously.
Yet, at times, this very lyricism becomes overwhelming. The density of metaphor, the layering of hallucination over reality, can make readers feel like they too are leaning against a wall, trying to hear something that’s only partly there.
Themes – Between the Real and the Remembered
1. Grief as Geography
Each chapter in Rooms for Vanishing is a different emotional country. Grief is never just sadness—it is architecture, it is language, it is inheritance. Nadler turns sorrow into terrain, one in which each Alterman has built a secret dwelling. They do not live with grief. They live in it.
2. Holocaust Memory and Inherited Trauma
Sonja’s childhood on the Kindertransport, Moses’ spectral visions, Arnold’s search for Sonja—all are echoes of Jewish survival turned into mythic repetition. Nadler does not fictionalize the Holocaust; rather, he lets its silences speak volumes. The trauma does not appear as scenes but as psychological residues—phantoms inhabiting modern-day London, Montreal, Vienna, and Los Angeles.
3. Doppelgängers and Doubled Lives
Fania seeing her double in a hotel basement, Sonja watching a woman on TV who looks exactly like her, Franz's delusional sightings of Anya—all suggest identity as a mutable thing. These are people who were never allowed to become whole, always split between the lives they lived and the ones stolen from them.
Character Analysis – Fragmented Souls
Sonja Alterman
Sonja’s sections—by far the most emotionally harrowing—are portraits of a woman unmoored. Her pain is not subtle; it is loud, operatic, and often painfully introspective. The death of her daughter Anya isn’t the beginning of her unraveling, but it becomes the moment she stops pretending she’s still woven together. Her monologues, bordering on stream-of-consciousness, are lyrical yet devastatingly grounded.
Franz
A conductor by profession, Franz becomes the most enigmatic presence. His vanishing, which initiates the book's narrative, mirrors his emotional withdrawal long before he physically disappears. He exists more vividly in memory and hallucination than in action—an absent father, a grieving husband, a man building new myths to survive the unbearable.
Fania & Arnold
Fania's doppelgänger encounter and Montreal exile embody the conflict between past and present self. Arnold, the least explored, perhaps intentionally so, becomes the final thread—an old man clinging to the impossible hope that someone might still be out there.
Strengths of the Novel
- Inventive Structure: The novel reads like a chamber piece: multiple movements, different instruments, variations on a theme. Each chapter is a different room and voice, making the book feel deeply architectural in design.
- Powerful Emotional Resonance: Nadler taps into deep wells of human sorrow without ever making it feel performative. His grief is earned.
- Use of Magical Realism and Ghosts: The ghosts in this novel are neither horror nor fantasy. They’re emotional placeholders—flickers of what could have been, what was, and what never had a chance to become.
- Exploration of Post-Holocaust Identity: Without recounting horrors in graphic detail, Nadler shows their long shadows—how trauma is inherited, spoken through generations in fragmented stories and inherited silences.
Critiques and Challenges
Despite its brilliance, Rooms for Vanishing is not without its flaws:
- A Demanding Read: The prose, while beautiful, can be exhausting. The narrative's non-linearity and heavy use of symbolism require full attention and emotional bandwidth.
- Limited Momentum: Readers seeking plot-driven WWII fiction may struggle with the book’s lack of forward propulsion. This is a novel of reflection, not revelation.
- Character Distance: The poetic tone, while exquisite, sometimes places a glass wall between the reader and the characters. We observe their grief more than we inhabit it.
Wrapping It Up – A Book Worth Listening To in Silence
In Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler composes a fugue of grief and longing, where each movement returns to the same mournful chord: absence. The novel demands something rare from its reader—stillness. It’s a work that must be read slowly, like a sacred text or a faded photograph rediscovered in a drawer decades after the war. It doesn't offer resolution, but rather the dignity of remembering, of listening closely for footsteps through the walls.
For those willing to listen, Nadler’s novel offers something unforgettable: the realization that sometimes, the only way to bear the unthinkable is to vanish into a room where memory and desire still live.
Plot Overview – Four Rooms, One Family, Infinite Ghosts
At its core, Rooms for Vanishing is the shattered mosaic of the Alterman family, Vienna-born and war-torn, their lives torn asunder by the Holocaust and scattered like ash on the wind.
- Sonja, the daughter, grieving the loss of her child Anya and the disappearance of her husband Franz, lives in a liminal space between mourning and madness.
- Fania, the mother, is haunted—sometimes literally—by the version of herself she abandoned, and the life she once held before Montreal swallowed her.
- Moses, the son, haunted by ghosts both metaphoric and spectral, returns to Prague, seeking the shadow of a friend long gone.
- Arnold, the father, living with absence as a permanent state, receives a note that might be from his long-lost daughter—and chooses to believe it.
Their narratives are nonlinear but interlinked, each character suspended in a different "room," a term Nadler uses not just spatially, but cosmically—separate existences echoing one another through memory, hallucination, and inexplicable reunions. The narrative doesn’t offer reunion so much as it offers simultaneous longing: characters imagining each other across time, space, and death.
Writing Style – A Language of Longing
Adapting a distinctly poetic and elegiac style, Nadler writes with the tremor of someone chronicling the unfilmable—the emotions too vague for visual media, too complex for speech. His prose is lyrical but intentional, and every sentence reads like it has been weighed for memory.
The voice is fragmented, reflective of the characters’ fractured identities. Sonja’s grief, especially, becomes a proxy for the Holocaust's generational trauma—personal, yet archetypal. Nadler’s genius lies in blending this voice across four characters while keeping each identity distinct. The novel reads like a chorus where each singer mourns in harmony and disharmony simultaneously.
Yet, at times, this very lyricism becomes overwhelming. The density of metaphor, the layering of hallucination over reality, can make readers feel like they too are leaning against a wall, trying to hear something that’s only partly there.
Themes – Between the Real and the Remembered
1. Grief as Geography
Each chapter in Rooms for Vanishing is a different emotional country. Grief is never just sadness—it is architecture, it is language, it is inheritance. Nadler turns sorrow into terrain, one in which each Alterman has built a secret dwelling. They do not live with grief. They live in it.
2. Holocaust Memory and Inherited Trauma
Sonja’s childhood on the Kindertransport, Moses’ spectral visions, Arnold’s search for Sonja—all are echoes of Jewish survival turned into mythic repetition. Nadler does not fictionalize the Holocaust; rather, he lets its silences speak volumes. The trauma does not appear as scenes but as psychological residues—phantoms inhabiting modern-day London, Montreal, Vienna, and Los Angeles.
3. Doppelgängers and Doubled Lives
Fania seeing her double in a hotel basement, Sonja watching a woman on TV who looks exactly like her, Franz's delusional sightings of Anya—all suggest identity as a mutable thing. These are people who were never allowed to become whole, always split between the lives they lived and the ones stolen from them.
Character Analysis – Fragmented Souls
Sonja Alterman
Sonja’s sections—by far the most emotionally harrowing—are portraits of a woman unmoored. Her pain is not subtle; it is loud, operatic, and often painfully introspective. The death of her daughter Anya isn’t the beginning of her unraveling, but it becomes the moment she stops pretending she’s still woven together. Her monologues, bordering on stream-of-consciousness, are lyrical yet devastatingly grounded.
Franz
A conductor by profession, Franz becomes the most enigmatic presence. His vanishing, which initiates the book's narrative, mirrors his emotional withdrawal long before he physically disappears. He exists more vividly in memory and hallucination than in action—an absent father, a grieving husband, a man building new myths to survive the unbearable.
Fania & Arnold
Fania's doppelgänger encounter and Montreal exile embody the conflict between past and present self. Arnold, the least explored, perhaps intentionally so, becomes the final thread—an old man clinging to the impossible hope that someone might still be out there.
Strengths of the Novel
- Inventive Structure: The novel reads like a chamber piece: multiple movements, different instruments, variations on a theme. Each chapter is a different room and voice, making the book feel deeply architectural in design.
- Powerful Emotional Resonance: Nadler taps into deep wells of human sorrow without ever making it feel performative. His grief is earned.
- Use of Magical Realism and Ghosts: The ghosts in this novel are neither horror nor fantasy. They’re emotional placeholders—flickers of what could have been, what was, and what never had a chance to become.
- Exploration of Post-Holocaust Identity: Without recounting horrors in graphic detail, Nadler shows their long shadows—how trauma is inherited, spoken through generations in fragmented stories and inherited silences.
Critiques and Challenges
Despite its brilliance, Rooms for Vanishing is not without its flaws:
- A Demanding Read: The prose, while beautiful, can be exhausting. The narrative's non-linearity and heavy use of symbolism require full attention and emotional bandwidth.
- Limited Momentum: Readers seeking plot-driven WWII fiction may struggle with the book’s lack of forward propulsion. This is a novel of reflection, not revelation.
- Character Distance: The poetic tone, while exquisite, sometimes places a glass wall between the reader and the characters. We observe their grief more than we inhabit it.
Wrapping It Up – A Book Worth Listening To in Silence
In Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler composes a fugue of grief and longing, where each movement returns to the same mournful chord: absence. The novel demands something rare from its reader—stillness. It’s a work that must be read slowly, like a sacred text or a faded photograph rediscovered in a drawer decades after the war. It doesn't offer resolution, but rather the dignity of remembering, of listening closely for footsteps through the walls.
For those willing to listen, Nadler’s novel offers something unforgettable: the realization that sometimes, the only way to bear the unthinkable is to vanish into a room where memory and desire still live.
April 3, 2025
This book is hard to describe. The story is about a family in Vienna during WWII. The Altermans, Sonya, Moses, Fania, and Arnold. Each family member tells their story. Describing their deaths at the hands of the nazis. Then, they describe their lives as if they survived and lived in different parts of the world. They struggle with grief and guilt that they alone survived. At times, it's hauntingly sad and, at times, a bit confusing. I look forward to meeting the author next month at a book event in Vermont. I'm hoping to get some clarity.
I give this book 4 stars mainly for the beautiful prose and unique storyline.
I give this book 4 stars mainly for the beautiful prose and unique storyline.
December 17, 2024
DNF. Quit reading at page 313.
It's genuinely horrifying that this book was so topical. The spitting on babies... I think this book was intended to be about the ripple effect of trauma and grief that happened, or could have happened, across different streams of reality or across different dimensions, during and in the generations following the Holocaust.
By page 50, I was baffled. I couldn't tell what was really happening. The book offers very limited dialogue, mostly internal musing from, for instance, a bereaved mother who lost her natal family very early in life due to the war and is unmoored from her roots throughout life.
Frustrating as this was to try and read, the writing was lovely enough, with enough pathos that I persisted on through 300+ pages before giving up.
Losing one's mind in grief is relatable. Reading about this in someone else's confusion for 300 pages is less than edifying.
It's genuinely horrifying that this book was so topical. The spitting on babies... I think this book was intended to be about the ripple effect of trauma and grief that happened, or could have happened, across different streams of reality or across different dimensions, during and in the generations following the Holocaust.
By page 50, I was baffled. I couldn't tell what was really happening. The book offers very limited dialogue, mostly internal musing from, for instance, a bereaved mother who lost her natal family very early in life due to the war and is unmoored from her roots throughout life.
Frustrating as this was to try and read, the writing was lovely enough, with enough pathos that I persisted on through 300+ pages before giving up.
Losing one's mind in grief is relatable. Reading about this in someone else's confusion for 300 pages is less than edifying.
November 29, 2024
What a book. A family so heavily in grief you’re unsure if they are here on earth or if they’ve passed. I couldn’t put it down, tissues needed.
Thank you Penguin & Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book.
Thank you Penguin & Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book.
October 12, 2025
3.5/5
War kills those left alive and resurrects the dead in their memory. Confusing in the way all ghost stories tend to be. It came to a point where I wasn't sure what was real and what was imagined; was anything ever real? Including the narrators themselves? Rooms for Vanishing follows the Altermans, a Jewish family tragically separated by war and all the permutations of reality that could come after it. Each family member, of which there are four (mother-father-daughter-son), gets 3 chapters each set in different time periods and locations. I, at first, held hope that they were all set in the same universe, which isnt hard since they all haunt each other's narrative, but the cracks start to show the moment they interact with a supposed family member in their timeline- who is more obviously a receptacle of ideas and repressed emotions rather than an actual breathing person. Also, I'm not sure why, but it feels like all the female characters talk the same way, like if you erased names from dialogue and put Sonia, Fania, and Zofie's quotes next to each other I wouldnt know who said which. In any case, the writing was beautiful, lyrical and weighed down by love and grief, disillusionment and madness. This book is not your typical post-war novel; there is barely any resolution or recovery to be found in its pages, and a reader's enjoyment may hinge on their willingness to let plot take a back seat to narrative and themes. A mind-bending literary exercise on remembrance and grief.
Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
War kills those left alive and resurrects the dead in their memory. Confusing in the way all ghost stories tend to be. It came to a point where I wasn't sure what was real and what was imagined; was anything ever real? Including the narrators themselves? Rooms for Vanishing follows the Altermans, a Jewish family tragically separated by war and all the permutations of reality that could come after it. Each family member, of which there are four (mother-father-daughter-son), gets 3 chapters each set in different time periods and locations. I, at first, held hope that they were all set in the same universe, which isnt hard since they all haunt each other's narrative, but the cracks start to show the moment they interact with a supposed family member in their timeline- who is more obviously a receptacle of ideas and repressed emotions rather than an actual breathing person. Also, I'm not sure why, but it feels like all the female characters talk the same way, like if you erased names from dialogue and put Sonia, Fania, and Zofie's quotes next to each other I wouldnt know who said which. In any case, the writing was beautiful, lyrical and weighed down by love and grief, disillusionment and madness. This book is not your typical post-war novel; there is barely any resolution or recovery to be found in its pages, and a reader's enjoyment may hinge on their willingness to let plot take a back seat to narrative and themes. A mind-bending literary exercise on remembrance and grief.
Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
January 9, 2025
This is an extraordinary novel of depth filled with emotion on occasions it’s quite surreal.
It looks at the story of a number of families who are linked by the loss of a child. Some children are lost during the holocaust some die in childhood from medical conditions but all leave behind parents desperately missing their loved ones and struggling to come to terms with their loss. This is a loss that isn’t just something that happens immediately after the child no longer exists but something that the mother or father feels throughout life even as they become elderly there’s something missing in their lives. This is a recurrent theme throughout the novel that of loss yearning and of reunions
This author has a distinct writing style which reads like a stream of consciousness as if the narrator is thinking without any plans to what they’re going to say i’m struggled a bit to get into it at the start but once I was used to it I enjoyed it .
You offer has a sometimes poetic writing style, a sentence I particularly loved was“People in pain exist in two places at once within the pain which is an endless place a place of incompressible death and they are also in a place where the pain is vanished a future Place” . as a chronic pain suffer this sentence really resonated with me.
There are elements to this book which are quite surreal. There is a clear image of a elderly Czeck mother for example living in a house that is falling down around her with trees growing in the inside of the house
On multiple occasions in the story there’s ghosts which some people can see and some can’t
This is an unusual book and the different elements place it strongly within the literary fiction category it’s not a simple holocaust memorial novel, although of course there are elements of the book that are just this. Ultimately it’s a novel about what it means to be human and how much we love our families. There’s a deep abiding feeling of family within this novel and understanding of the complexities of our relationships.
I recommend this novel to those who like a primarily character based novel with historical and literary elements
I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK in return for an honest review because of this they were Formatting errors which made it this harder to read then it might otherwise have been it’s a testament to how strong the novel is that I persevered
The novel is published in the UK on the 21st of August 2025 by Pan MacMillan
This review will appear on StoryGraph, Goodreads, and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.wordpress.com. After publication will also appear on Amazon UK.
It looks at the story of a number of families who are linked by the loss of a child. Some children are lost during the holocaust some die in childhood from medical conditions but all leave behind parents desperately missing their loved ones and struggling to come to terms with their loss. This is a loss that isn’t just something that happens immediately after the child no longer exists but something that the mother or father feels throughout life even as they become elderly there’s something missing in their lives. This is a recurrent theme throughout the novel that of loss yearning and of reunions
This author has a distinct writing style which reads like a stream of consciousness as if the narrator is thinking without any plans to what they’re going to say i’m struggled a bit to get into it at the start but once I was used to it I enjoyed it .
You offer has a sometimes poetic writing style, a sentence I particularly loved was“People in pain exist in two places at once within the pain which is an endless place a place of incompressible death and they are also in a place where the pain is vanished a future Place” . as a chronic pain suffer this sentence really resonated with me.
There are elements to this book which are quite surreal. There is a clear image of a elderly Czeck mother for example living in a house that is falling down around her with trees growing in the inside of the house
On multiple occasions in the story there’s ghosts which some people can see and some can’t
This is an unusual book and the different elements place it strongly within the literary fiction category it’s not a simple holocaust memorial novel, although of course there are elements of the book that are just this. Ultimately it’s a novel about what it means to be human and how much we love our families. There’s a deep abiding feeling of family within this novel and understanding of the complexities of our relationships.
I recommend this novel to those who like a primarily character based novel with historical and literary elements
I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK in return for an honest review because of this they were Formatting errors which made it this harder to read then it might otherwise have been it’s a testament to how strong the novel is that I persevered
The novel is published in the UK on the 21st of August 2025 by Pan MacMillan
This review will appear on StoryGraph, Goodreads, and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.wordpress.com. After publication will also appear on Amazon UK.
July 8, 2025
I had high hopes for Rooms for Vanishing, but this novel left me frustrated and exhausted.
The story follows the Alterman family—Fania, Arnold, Sonya, and Moses—whose lives are torn apart by World War II. Sonya is sent to England on a Kindertransport, while the rest of the family is separated and presumed lost. Decades later, each family member reemerges in scattered timelines: Sonya in 1979 Britain, Fania in 1969 Montreal, Moses in 2016 New York, and Arnold in 2002 Vienna. Each narrative is steeped in grief, regret, and missed connections, often involving ghosts, imagined lives, or timelines that never fully align.
The premise is ambitious: a multiverse of grief where the dead and living coexist in fractured realities. But instead of being poignant, it’s overwhelmingly confusing. The structure is chaotic, and characters often blend together—everyone speaks in the same indistinct voice, making it hard to track who is narrating or when events are taking place. I found myself constantly flipping back, wanting to take notes, and still feeling lost.
Emotionally, the novel is relentlessly bleak. Its heaviness never lifts, and the ambiguity drains rather than deepens the impact. The metaphor of grief as separate “rooms” people occupy is interesting in theory but poorly executed in practice. Key moments turn out to be imaginary or metaphorical, which makes the already disjointed plot even harder to invest in.
Some readers may admire its complexity, but for me, it felt like an exercise in literary obscurity. I came close to giving up more than once, and I finished the book more out of obligation than interest. This simply wasn’t the powerful, moving story I had hoped for.
The story follows the Alterman family—Fania, Arnold, Sonya, and Moses—whose lives are torn apart by World War II. Sonya is sent to England on a Kindertransport, while the rest of the family is separated and presumed lost. Decades later, each family member reemerges in scattered timelines: Sonya in 1979 Britain, Fania in 1969 Montreal, Moses in 2016 New York, and Arnold in 2002 Vienna. Each narrative is steeped in grief, regret, and missed connections, often involving ghosts, imagined lives, or timelines that never fully align.
The premise is ambitious: a multiverse of grief where the dead and living coexist in fractured realities. But instead of being poignant, it’s overwhelmingly confusing. The structure is chaotic, and characters often blend together—everyone speaks in the same indistinct voice, making it hard to track who is narrating or when events are taking place. I found myself constantly flipping back, wanting to take notes, and still feeling lost.
Emotionally, the novel is relentlessly bleak. Its heaviness never lifts, and the ambiguity drains rather than deepens the impact. The metaphor of grief as separate “rooms” people occupy is interesting in theory but poorly executed in practice. Key moments turn out to be imaginary or metaphorical, which makes the already disjointed plot even harder to invest in.
Some readers may admire its complexity, but for me, it felt like an exercise in literary obscurity. I came close to giving up more than once, and I finished the book more out of obligation than interest. This simply wasn’t the powerful, moving story I had hoped for.
March 24, 2025
This book demands your full attention. I feel like this would be an excellent book for a high school English class to analyze.
After reading it I still don't completely understand what happened. I still don't know if it was a ghost story where the main characters were interacting with their dead family members or just sad and crazy with loss or if it was trying to depict alternative realities where different people survived. Truly I just need someone smarter than me to explain the entire story. I do appreciate the author's creative mind while writing this.
After reading it I still don't completely understand what happened. I still don't know if it was a ghost story where the main characters were interacting with their dead family members or just sad and crazy with loss or if it was trying to depict alternative realities where different people survived. Truly I just need someone smarter than me to explain the entire story. I do appreciate the author's creative mind while writing this.
July 27, 2025
An admirable idea for a heartbreaking tale but I'm afraid there were so many alternative realities going on within each character's timelines I found it all very confusing. I really read it, properly paid attention but once I got to about 60% in I just got bored of trying to figure out what was actually going on. Far too clever for my good.
April 26, 2025
4.5 stars rounded to 5. This is a book like no other I have ever read. The complex literary writing style was more like poetry. It is provocative and mind bending and tells the story of a Jewish family, each believing they are the family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust, but each living in their own separate futures. What is real and what is the result of a grieving and tortured mind? Do ghosts even exist? Provocative and stunning.
April 5, 2025
Pure alchemy. What Nadler does with time, grief, and family trauma is impressive.
February 10, 2025
‘i will never come back here, or to any of these places,’ she said, meaning, i think, these cities in which we were children, prague, munich, vienna, all of them museums to history, monuments to misery, living tombs.
i cannot begin to describe the way this book has transfixed me. i loved all four storylines, but moses and his wanderings around new york and prague with ambrož made me weep several times; the imagery of him having his poems sewn onto the insides of his jeans is one of the most beautiful things i have read as of lately. i am 100% sure this will be among my favourite reads of 2025, if not my number one.
many thanks to edelweiss for providing me with an arc ahead of its release.
i cannot begin to describe the way this book has transfixed me. i loved all four storylines, but moses and his wanderings around new york and prague with ambrož made me weep several times; the imagery of him having his poems sewn onto the insides of his jeans is one of the most beautiful things i have read as of lately. i am 100% sure this will be among my favourite reads of 2025, if not my number one.
many thanks to edelweiss for providing me with an arc ahead of its release.
October 9, 2025
There were parts of this book that absolutely gutted me. I have never read a book that so accurately portrayed grief, loss, longing, or the the annihilation of an community identity. My heart physically ached through many sections.
However, it is extremely overwrought and long, not a great combination. Despite the deeply eloquent prose it felt like a slog to get through. There is only so much vague and existential grief most readers are prepared to endure.
However, it is extremely overwrought and long, not a great combination. Despite the deeply eloquent prose it felt like a slog to get through. There is only so much vague and existential grief most readers are prepared to endure.
August 15, 2025
Rooms for Vanishing is a novel, surreal take on the family saga - a haunting story of grief, trauma, history and possibility.
When war comes to Vienna, the Altermans, a Jewish Austrian family are brutally separated. Five-year-old Sonja is dispatched to England on a Kindertransport train while her parents, Fania and Arnold, are sent to the death camps. Baby Moses, just six months old, is wrenched from his mother's arms.
Years later, as the world recovers and reconstructs itself and the surviving Jews of Europe live scattered far from their homelands, each of the Altermans inhabits a separate future, sure that they are the only one left and - in the case of the children - having few memories of the time before. Separated by continents and decades, we see Sonja in 1979 London, reeling from the loss of her own young daughter and searching for her missing husband, who is convinced that she is still alive. In 1966 Montreal, Fania meets Hermann, a fellow Viennese refugee, and wonders if it could be possible to find a path through the grief which still consumes her. In 2000 New York City, Moses, now an old man himself, awaits the birth of his first grandchild. In 2016 Vienna, Arnold celebrates his ninety-ninth birthday and reflects on all that he has witnessed over almost a century of living. Each character imagines the paths the others' lives might have taken if they had lived, as well as how their own lives might have been different if they had made different choices.
Each character has their own distinct narrative voice, and their timelines are populated with well-drawn, fully-realised supporting characters, from Jonathan, the devoted assistant to Sonja's mecurial composer husband to charming, witty Hermann and whip-smart, no-nonsense Žofie, Moses' erstwhile lover. Author Stuart Nadler clearly relishes choosing the perfect words to capture a place, a moment or a feeling: Sonja's toxic dynamic with her husband is 'ruinous and dejecting', while his laugh is described as 'a baleful and glassy and vindictive piece of lordliness. In a book which music is used as an important motif, he even gleefully includes Sonja describing Mozart et al as 'this dead-men parade of ghoulish ivory tickling.'
Music plays an important part in each timeline, and it is used to create narrative cohesion as well as explore several disparate ideas: how a piece of music can sound beautifully and yet be so awfully sad that one cannot bear to listen to it; how it was taken from the Jews as part of the process of dehumanising them; how it evokes guilt in those who play when others cannot, when terrible events continue to unfold unceasingly around the world.
The novel deploys an unusual, sometimes bewildering, structure, taking vast leaps across time and space and having the reader guess at events that transpired in the intervening years. It isn't a quick or easy read, thanks to dense symbolism and its non-linear chronology, but it is one of the most profound pieces of contemporary fiction I have come across. If you are willing to invest the time in Rooms for Vanishing, you will come away with a far greater understanding of mid-century European politics (and the inexorable themes of prejudice, persecution and exile that dominate history) and Jewish diaspora trauma, and you will have explored some great questions on the nature of life and loss.
Each character battles with the draw of returning to - or at least revisiting - their homeland versus the horror of having to confront places which were once safe but could ultimately offer no protection from the evil with a human face which stalked Europe, as well as the fact that much of the culture and history which they attach to these nations was long ago eradicated. They wonder too if it is better to seek definitive answers as to their loved ones' fates or to comfort themselves by imagining brighter futures for those who vanished.
Each of the characters is haunted, both by the actual loss of their loved ones and by the snatched potential of their stolen lives, and the author has this manifest differently for each of them: some are consumed by their memories; others encounter their doppelganger or are stalked by the mournful ghost of a lost friend. We are left wondering which timeline, if any, is real. Who is alive and who is a ghost or a manifestation of memory? Each narrative seems plausible, replete with its own struggles, successes and tragedies, but given that at least 60,000 Austrian Jews were murdered by the Nazis (almost all who didn't emigrate before the outbreak of war), the reader must accept the possibility that none of that which we read is true; it is all a fantasy of what might have been. It is a bold choice by Nadler to leave us wondering.
Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
When war comes to Vienna, the Altermans, a Jewish Austrian family are brutally separated. Five-year-old Sonja is dispatched to England on a Kindertransport train while her parents, Fania and Arnold, are sent to the death camps. Baby Moses, just six months old, is wrenched from his mother's arms.
Years later, as the world recovers and reconstructs itself and the surviving Jews of Europe live scattered far from their homelands, each of the Altermans inhabits a separate future, sure that they are the only one left and - in the case of the children - having few memories of the time before. Separated by continents and decades, we see Sonja in 1979 London, reeling from the loss of her own young daughter and searching for her missing husband, who is convinced that she is still alive. In 1966 Montreal, Fania meets Hermann, a fellow Viennese refugee, and wonders if it could be possible to find a path through the grief which still consumes her. In 2000 New York City, Moses, now an old man himself, awaits the birth of his first grandchild. In 2016 Vienna, Arnold celebrates his ninety-ninth birthday and reflects on all that he has witnessed over almost a century of living. Each character imagines the paths the others' lives might have taken if they had lived, as well as how their own lives might have been different if they had made different choices.
Each character has their own distinct narrative voice, and their timelines are populated with well-drawn, fully-realised supporting characters, from Jonathan, the devoted assistant to Sonja's mecurial composer husband to charming, witty Hermann and whip-smart, no-nonsense Žofie, Moses' erstwhile lover. Author Stuart Nadler clearly relishes choosing the perfect words to capture a place, a moment or a feeling: Sonja's toxic dynamic with her husband is 'ruinous and dejecting', while his laugh is described as 'a baleful and glassy and vindictive piece of lordliness. In a book which music is used as an important motif, he even gleefully includes Sonja describing Mozart et al as 'this dead-men parade of ghoulish ivory tickling.'
Music plays an important part in each timeline, and it is used to create narrative cohesion as well as explore several disparate ideas: how a piece of music can sound beautifully and yet be so awfully sad that one cannot bear to listen to it; how it was taken from the Jews as part of the process of dehumanising them; how it evokes guilt in those who play when others cannot, when terrible events continue to unfold unceasingly around the world.
The novel deploys an unusual, sometimes bewildering, structure, taking vast leaps across time and space and having the reader guess at events that transpired in the intervening years. It isn't a quick or easy read, thanks to dense symbolism and its non-linear chronology, but it is one of the most profound pieces of contemporary fiction I have come across. If you are willing to invest the time in Rooms for Vanishing, you will come away with a far greater understanding of mid-century European politics (and the inexorable themes of prejudice, persecution and exile that dominate history) and Jewish diaspora trauma, and you will have explored some great questions on the nature of life and loss.
Each character battles with the draw of returning to - or at least revisiting - their homeland versus the horror of having to confront places which were once safe but could ultimately offer no protection from the evil with a human face which stalked Europe, as well as the fact that much of the culture and history which they attach to these nations was long ago eradicated. They wonder too if it is better to seek definitive answers as to their loved ones' fates or to comfort themselves by imagining brighter futures for those who vanished.
Each of the characters is haunted, both by the actual loss of their loved ones and by the snatched potential of their stolen lives, and the author has this manifest differently for each of them: some are consumed by their memories; others encounter their doppelganger or are stalked by the mournful ghost of a lost friend. We are left wondering which timeline, if any, is real. Who is alive and who is a ghost or a manifestation of memory? Each narrative seems plausible, replete with its own struggles, successes and tragedies, but given that at least 60,000 Austrian Jews were murdered by the Nazis (almost all who didn't emigrate before the outbreak of war), the reader must accept the possibility that none of that which we read is true; it is all a fantasy of what might have been. It is a bold choice by Nadler to leave us wondering.
Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
September 23, 2024
I wrestled with myself for days about how to review this novel, rolling the stories around in my head. It's not like anything I've ever read before, like a puzzle that will break your heart. Let me try to explain how I think this book works and how it impacted this reader.
Sonja Alterman is sent to Britain on the Kindertransport with the belief that her family will follow. They do not. She marries a respected conductor and they have a daughter who dies at age nine. Her husband sees a photo of a woman he believes is their daughter, grown, and disappears.
There were four members of the family and we will meet all of them as if they lived, and perhaps they have. Mother Fania is in Montreal where she meets a woman who may be herself, or someone who moved into their Viennese apartment after her family was deported. Arnold is turning 99. a friend encourages him to take a DNA test, and he is contacted by a woman who says she is his daughter, Sonja. Moses was a baby when the family was taken, and now he is shadowed by a ghost who asks to be taken back to Prague where he can rest.
Are any of these people alive, or is this story about the madness of grief? What kept me turning the pages is the gorgeous writing and the hope that somehow, this family can connect, that someone will learn that they are not alone.
The story moves across time periods, generally following one societal upheaval or another. It is filled with aching hope and despair and some of it is hard to take. But Rooms for Vanishing is a remarkable achievement. Even writing this review gives me chills.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.
Sonja Alterman is sent to Britain on the Kindertransport with the belief that her family will follow. They do not. She marries a respected conductor and they have a daughter who dies at age nine. Her husband sees a photo of a woman he believes is their daughter, grown, and disappears.
There were four members of the family and we will meet all of them as if they lived, and perhaps they have. Mother Fania is in Montreal where she meets a woman who may be herself, or someone who moved into their Viennese apartment after her family was deported. Arnold is turning 99. a friend encourages him to take a DNA test, and he is contacted by a woman who says she is his daughter, Sonja. Moses was a baby when the family was taken, and now he is shadowed by a ghost who asks to be taken back to Prague where he can rest.
Are any of these people alive, or is this story about the madness of grief? What kept me turning the pages is the gorgeous writing and the hope that somehow, this family can connect, that someone will learn that they are not alone.
The story moves across time periods, generally following one societal upheaval or another. It is filled with aching hope and despair and some of it is hard to take. But Rooms for Vanishing is a remarkable achievement. Even writing this review gives me chills.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.
June 15, 2025
3.5 Stuart Nadler is an author I like but don't know anyone else who's read him. This one is probably not the place to start! It follows four members of the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna, each believing they are the sole survivor in the family. This is a book where I was never sure what was real and what wasn't (and think that's the point): it's populated with ghosts, doppelgangers, possible parallel universes (or separate rooms you can't enter, in the book's language), and possible hallucinations or psychotic breaks. It's also saturated with loss, yearning, grief, love, guilt, hope, and other intense emotions.
Interestingly, while each character is dealing with loss or searching for something, it's primarily not for each other (at least on the surface). Daughter Sonja, who was sent away on the Kindertransport, is searching for her missing husband, after already having lost a daughter. Mother Fania is starting over in a new city and having circular conversations with her English conversation partner, Hermann. Moses is awaiting his grandchild's birth and followed by the ghost companion of his poet friend Ambroz, who was killed in a demonstration. And father Arnold spends his time at the train station, awaiting the train of the woman he thinks is his daughter, only she never arrives.
There are also other characters who sometimes fleetingly show up in different sections, and it's not clear if it's the same person, a version from another "room", or what. It's all very confusing, but also very impressionistic, with some lovely writing and moving moments. I also wish the voices of the different narrators were a bit more distinctive.
Interestingly, while each character is dealing with loss or searching for something, it's primarily not for each other (at least on the surface). Daughter Sonja, who was sent away on the Kindertransport, is searching for her missing husband, after already having lost a daughter. Mother Fania is starting over in a new city and having circular conversations with her English conversation partner, Hermann. Moses is awaiting his grandchild's birth and followed by the ghost companion of his poet friend Ambroz, who was killed in a demonstration. And father Arnold spends his time at the train station, awaiting the train of the woman he thinks is his daughter, only she never arrives.
There are also other characters who sometimes fleetingly show up in different sections, and it's not clear if it's the same person, a version from another "room", or what. It's all very confusing, but also very impressionistic, with some lovely writing and moving moments. I also wish the voices of the different narrators were a bit more distinctive.
August 25, 2025
It's an unusual look at a Jewish family, the Altermans in Vienna, that was separated by WWII. Supposedly, they were each killed during the war, but were they? We hear each of their stories, as they each assume they were the lone survivor of their family. Daughter Sonja is grown up and living in London, where she was evacuated during the war as a child, with her conductor husband, who's just gone missing. Mom Fania survived a concentration camp and is living in Montreal, talking with another survivor, after fruitlessly searching for her family after the war. Moses, who was just six months old when he was torn from his mother's arms, is an older man in New York City now, waiting for the birth of his first grandchild and followed by the ghost of his best friend whom he saw shot in front of him as a young man in Prague. And Arnold, the father, is now 99 years old and is suddenly hopeful that his daughter may have survived after he receives a call from an Englishwoman. I read one review where the reviewer flat out stated that they all died, and this was just an imagining, but the official description of the book leaves it more open than that: "A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds." It was very well-written, engaging, and I enjoyed it. I am always fascinated by the theme of parallel universes. It's a complex novel, so if you want to hear more, I talk more about it in this video, starting at 1:38: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY1Zs...
April 4, 2025
This summer, I'll be rereading Rooms for Vanishing. At the moment, in the rush to squeeze in one more academic quarter before the end of the school year, my paying-sustained-attention skills are not at their best. I truly was awed (yes, I mean that) by this title, but I also know that I could be getting a great deal more from it if I could give it my full attention. I know I've missed things that will further that sense of awe.
I would describe Rooms for Vanishing as a sort of literary thought experiment. What would happen if a family of four were separated during the Holocaust with each member certain they're the only one who survived? What if ghosts accompanied them--ghosts that may be more solid in some ways than our central characters? What if each central character's life spooled out in ways that made the possibility of their ever having been a family less and less likely? What paths can be taken by a life shaped by grief?
Rooms for Vanishing will demand that you think--and feel--intensely. And it will pay back that effort again and again. There's a rich series of--loosely?--connected plots here, but the characters are the novel's heart. Listening to their stories in parallel is sometimes confusing, but also much more revealing, than any single narrative could be.
This is a book to read when your heart and mind are ready for a rewarding workout.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.
I would describe Rooms for Vanishing as a sort of literary thought experiment. What would happen if a family of four were separated during the Holocaust with each member certain they're the only one who survived? What if ghosts accompanied them--ghosts that may be more solid in some ways than our central characters? What if each central character's life spooled out in ways that made the possibility of their ever having been a family less and less likely? What paths can be taken by a life shaped by grief?
Rooms for Vanishing will demand that you think--and feel--intensely. And it will pay back that effort again and again. There's a rich series of--loosely?--connected plots here, but the characters are the novel's heart. Listening to their stories in parallel is sometimes confusing, but also much more revealing, than any single narrative could be.
This is a book to read when your heart and mind are ready for a rewarding workout.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.
March 23, 2025
Rooms for Vanishing is a poignant meditation on grief, memory, and the lingering presence of those we've lost. Told through the perspectives of multiple family members, the novel follows a Jewish family fractured by the Holocaust, exploring both their real lives and the imagined paths of those who never got the chance to live them. The result is a deeply reflective and melancholic narrative—one that blurs the line between reality and memory, past and present.
The writing is slow and deliberate, allowing the weight of loss to sink in. There’s an element of magical realism in how the dead remain intertwined with the living, a quiet but powerful reminder that grief doesn’t end—it simply changes shape. This is not a book of dramatic twists or grand revelations, but rather a deeply human story about what it means to carry absence.
If you’ve ever found yourself talking to someone who’s no longer there, imagining what their life might have been, this book will resonate. Rooms for Vanishing isn’t an easy read, but it’s one that lingers, long after the final page.
Thanks to Dutton for the advance review copy!
The writing is slow and deliberate, allowing the weight of loss to sink in. There’s an element of magical realism in how the dead remain intertwined with the living, a quiet but powerful reminder that grief doesn’t end—it simply changes shape. This is not a book of dramatic twists or grand revelations, but rather a deeply human story about what it means to carry absence.
If you’ve ever found yourself talking to someone who’s no longer there, imagining what their life might have been, this book will resonate. Rooms for Vanishing isn’t an easy read, but it’s one that lingers, long after the final page.
Thanks to Dutton for the advance review copy!
March 31, 2025
I received a free digital ARC copy of this book from the publishers Pan Macmillan via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
The heartache of trauma came across strongly in this story of a family thrown apart by the horrors of war. We follow each character at certain points in life. Daughter Sonja was sent away to London in a bid to keep her safe. Now Sonja is a bereaved parent, searching for her husband. He believes he has seen their deceased daughter and is in search of her. Mother Fania, struggling to cope with the loss of her children, sees herself and her lost family in the woman visiting her workplace. The son Moses awaits the birth of his grandson. He begins to see and speak with the ghost of a long ago friend. The father, Arnold, aged 99, takes a dna test to search for family. He then imagines the return of his adult daughter. The separate stories of the characters themselves were well written. However it felt like there was a lot to take in with the back and forward between them all. It meant that by the end, I was left wondering if I'd missed some vital part, unaware of who's story if any was the reality.
The heartache of trauma came across strongly in this story of a family thrown apart by the horrors of war. We follow each character at certain points in life. Daughter Sonja was sent away to London in a bid to keep her safe. Now Sonja is a bereaved parent, searching for her husband. He believes he has seen their deceased daughter and is in search of her. Mother Fania, struggling to cope with the loss of her children, sees herself and her lost family in the woman visiting her workplace. The son Moses awaits the birth of his grandson. He begins to see and speak with the ghost of a long ago friend. The father, Arnold, aged 99, takes a dna test to search for family. He then imagines the return of his adult daughter. The separate stories of the characters themselves were well written. However it felt like there was a lot to take in with the back and forward between them all. It meant that by the end, I was left wondering if I'd missed some vital part, unaware of who's story if any was the reality.
July 31, 2025
firstly: perhaps this is not the book for you if you struggle to understand how a book can be good beyond the story/events. if you are a language person, then i believe it is. i was profoundly moved by this book; i bought it without knowing what it was about because it didn’t have a blurb on the cover. i struggled to get into it, but once i did…. I wept. I wept while reading on the bus, on a plane, in the kitchen at my workplace. Again, i wasn’t even weeping at a turn of events in the book, just… the writing. The ideas. I can’t articulate it.
“…convinced then, as she was now, that there were people on earth whose bodies were not unlike the bodies of others, that there were only a certain number of possible iterations, a finite number of available models, like an automobile in a showroom, each with some small, nearly undetectable difference, and that if one traveled long enough, one could encounter the face of their friend, the hand of their grand-mother, a hand they had felt once but then had lost, something they had known from childhood, could trace from memory, could identify in darkness.”
“…convinced then, as she was now, that there were people on earth whose bodies were not unlike the bodies of others, that there were only a certain number of possible iterations, a finite number of available models, like an automobile in a showroom, each with some small, nearly undetectable difference, and that if one traveled long enough, one could encounter the face of their friend, the hand of their grand-mother, a hand they had felt once but then had lost, something they had known from childhood, could trace from memory, could identify in darkness.”
August 9, 2025
“Rooms for Vanishing” tells the story of one Jewish family torn apart by the Holocaust. They each think the others have died and you see how this experience influences the rest of their lives.
I really wanted to love this book but I found it difficult to read especially the more it went on. The way the story is written, you’re never sure whether the characters and the people they interact with are alive or dead. While some may find this intriguing (and I have seen other reviews say they loved this aspect) I just found it confusing. I also struggled to emotionally engage with the characters which you wouldn’t expect from a book with this sort of subject matter, and I put this down to it chopping and changing too much between the different characters points of view. I am used to books which hop around but I think this book would’ve benefited from telling one story at a time.
It’s an interesting perspective on the Holocaust, the twentieth and twenty first century, families, relationships and grief but it just wasn’t for me.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.
I really wanted to love this book but I found it difficult to read especially the more it went on. The way the story is written, you’re never sure whether the characters and the people they interact with are alive or dead. While some may find this intriguing (and I have seen other reviews say they loved this aspect) I just found it confusing. I also struggled to emotionally engage with the characters which you wouldn’t expect from a book with this sort of subject matter, and I put this down to it chopping and changing too much between the different characters points of view. I am used to books which hop around but I think this book would’ve benefited from telling one story at a time.
It’s an interesting perspective on the Holocaust, the twentieth and twenty first century, families, relationships and grief but it just wasn’t for me.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.
March 18, 2025
“Rooms for Vanishing,” by Stuart Nadler, Dutton, 464 pages, March 18, 2025.
The Altermans are a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938. The parents send Sonja, their daughter, on the Kindertransport to Britain to keep her safe from Nazis. They stay behind with infant, Moses.
Sonja believes her family will soon follow. They don’t. Years later, she marries a symphony conductor in London. They have a daughter who dies at the age of nine.
When Arnold, the father, is 99, he submits a DNA test and is then contacted by a woman claiming to be Sonja. Fania, the mother, ends up in Montreal with a man named Hermann. She encounters a woman who could be her double. Moses is followed by a ghost. Are these people actually alive and grieving or have they all died?
Unfortunately, I had trouble getting through this novel. It has long run-on sentences and is too fragmented to follow. It was not for me.
I rate it three out of five stars.
In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.
The Altermans are a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938. The parents send Sonja, their daughter, on the Kindertransport to Britain to keep her safe from Nazis. They stay behind with infant, Moses.
Sonja believes her family will soon follow. They don’t. Years later, she marries a symphony conductor in London. They have a daughter who dies at the age of nine.
When Arnold, the father, is 99, he submits a DNA test and is then contacted by a woman claiming to be Sonja. Fania, the mother, ends up in Montreal with a man named Hermann. She encounters a woman who could be her double. Moses is followed by a ghost. Are these people actually alive and grieving or have they all died?
Unfortunately, I had trouble getting through this novel. It has long run-on sentences and is too fragmented to follow. It was not for me.
I rate it three out of five stars.
In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.
May 24, 2025
I’ve just finished reading and I’m unsure what I’m feeling.
Firstly, it was beautifully written. I enjoyed hearing the different voices and it definitely evokes thoughts I’d never considered before. Obviously I know about the atrocities of the war but I have never really considered what it must be like to live without your family - to be told that they are no longer with us but not how they met their end or where. To then consider that each family member may be alone out there, forging a life alone. It’s powerful.
Secondly, I’m confused. Particularly by the final chapters from each character. Have they all descended into madness? Or they living a separate reality? Are they living at all? I’m not so good with ambiguity so rated lower than I expected to.
Another review mentioned clarity. I’d love some so it is likely that I’ll keep coming back to the reviews to see if others thoughts and takes help me.
Thank you for the advance copy.
Firstly, it was beautifully written. I enjoyed hearing the different voices and it definitely evokes thoughts I’d never considered before. Obviously I know about the atrocities of the war but I have never really considered what it must be like to live without your family - to be told that they are no longer with us but not how they met their end or where. To then consider that each family member may be alone out there, forging a life alone. It’s powerful.
Secondly, I’m confused. Particularly by the final chapters from each character. Have they all descended into madness? Or they living a separate reality? Are they living at all? I’m not so good with ambiguity so rated lower than I expected to.
Another review mentioned clarity. I’d love some so it is likely that I’ll keep coming back to the reviews to see if others thoughts and takes help me.
Thank you for the advance copy.
June 3, 2025
I was asked by NetGalley to review this book set in World War 2 in Vienna- a very different slant and quite intriguing.
The story is set around the Altermans, Sonya, Moses, Fania and Arnold.
This is where this is different the family member tell their individual stories. Describing their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.( normally the reader would experience some family members surviving this terrible time and looking back on those who sadly did not make it.) This is now the difference Then, they describe their lives as if they survived and lived in different parts of the world.
I have read a great deal concerning the Holocaust and this is not only beautifully written but in my view well researched on this part of history.
At times I wondered whilst reading this did they die?
Due for publication August 21 2025. This is a really recommended read.
The story is set around the Altermans, Sonya, Moses, Fania and Arnold.
This is where this is different the family member tell their individual stories. Describing their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.( normally the reader would experience some family members surviving this terrible time and looking back on those who sadly did not make it.) This is now the difference Then, they describe their lives as if they survived and lived in different parts of the world.
I have read a great deal concerning the Holocaust and this is not only beautifully written but in my view well researched on this part of history.
At times I wondered whilst reading this did they die?
Due for publication August 21 2025. This is a really recommended read.
August 22, 2025
Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
Fania,Arnold,Sonja and Moses, a Jewish family in Vienna, have their lives blown apart by the Holocaust. The ripples of this cataclysm are not only physical, but metaphysical,emotional and of a magnitude that extend years into the future.
Each of their stories, of finding an existence post such trauma,include the resilience of carrying on, but with the weight of grief and endless dreamlike searching for lost ones.
The reader begins to question how much of these stories are factual, imagined or alternative realities.
A book for patient readers, with fluctuating periods of urgency, but leaving one clearly imbued with the understanding that loss is not only of past but also future memories. Peace comes when being able to reconcile both.
#docs.reading.room
Fania,Arnold,Sonja and Moses, a Jewish family in Vienna, have their lives blown apart by the Holocaust. The ripples of this cataclysm are not only physical, but metaphysical,emotional and of a magnitude that extend years into the future.
Each of their stories, of finding an existence post such trauma,include the resilience of carrying on, but with the weight of grief and endless dreamlike searching for lost ones.
The reader begins to question how much of these stories are factual, imagined or alternative realities.
A book for patient readers, with fluctuating periods of urgency, but leaving one clearly imbued with the understanding that loss is not only of past but also future memories. Peace comes when being able to reconcile both.
#docs.reading.room
January 18, 2025
The novel is the story of four members of a Jewish family from Vienna who are separated in the Nazi occupation of Austria. The story begins with that of Sonja, the daughter, who was sent away by her parents, Arnold and Fania, to London on a train to escape death. She comes to believe her parents and baby brother, Moses, died. Later chapters introduce Fania, Arnold, and Moses living their lives across varied timelines, also all believing the others are dead. The novel feels like a deep-dive into grief and loss, but also like a mystery and a search for meaning and identity. The prose is beautiful and the characters are compelling. It was a very moving portrayal of grief, of the experience of the uncertainty of reality, and of the nature of memory.
February 23, 2025
Der Holocaust als uchronischer Moment, der für jedes der Mitglieder der Familie Alterman eine alternative Zukunft erzeugt, in der sie nahe und fern, lebendig und tot sind wie Schrödingers Katze. Von jedem von ihnen wird die Geschichte ab dem Moment der Trennung erzählt, ein mögliches und doch unmögliches Leben, wie die ewige Warte Arnold am Wiener Bahnhof zeigt, wo er hofft, seine Tochter wiederzusehen, die mit dem Kindertransport nach England geschickt wurde. Ein ergreifender Roman, weil er vom Schrecken der Vergangenheit und der Hoffnung auf die Zukunft durchdrungen ist, die hätte sein können. Nachdem ich die letzte Seite umblättern, habe ich mir gedacht: „Sie sind alle tot, und doch sind sie alle tot“, und doch fällt es mir extrem schwer, sie gehen zu lassen.
May 10, 2025
I am giving this book four stars because it is a mesmerizing poetic portrait of the grief that remains among those left behind. In the chaos after the Holocaust, a husband and his wife, and their two children are lost to each other, maybe dead or maybe alive. Or perhaps each family member hears their loved ones, like searching for someone hiding in the room next door, but unable to find them.
For me, the story was diminished by not knowing what was real and what was imagination. Did this family survive only to never find each other? Or is the story a mystical portrayal of what could have been possible?
If you can hold numerous possibilities in your head, you will be rewarded with a moving and original novel.
For me, the story was diminished by not knowing what was real and what was imagination. Did this family survive only to never find each other? Or is the story a mystical portrayal of what could have been possible?
If you can hold numerous possibilities in your head, you will be rewarded with a moving and original novel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews