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A Novel
by Stuart Nadler
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 warhas 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.
"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
This information about Rooms for Vanishing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 teaches creative writing at Boston College and is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in New England.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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