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May 2025 Diverse Read: Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
A prismatic, mind-bending 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 that 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 eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; and 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. 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.
Excerpt of Rooms for Vanishing
Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 prize from the National Book Foundation and the author of two novels, Wise Men and The Inseparables, as well as a short 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 member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
LOOK AHEAD:
- June Diverse Read: The World So Wide by Zilla Jones
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