I liked the premise of this book but it just didn’t grab me. I found it hard to get to know the characters and feel attachment to them. I did really struggle with the fact that there’s no speech marks in part 1 - and then part 2 had speech marks in some parts and not in others. It made it quite difficult to follow what was going on. I appreciate it’s sort of written like a letter so is maybe intentional but for me it made it difficult to read. But that may just be personal preference

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

This book although of a subject matter I found very moving, it did not work for me. It did not flow and I found it a bit confusing at times. Thank you for the opportunity to read it.

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 really recommended read.

Through the horrors of war comes this story which for me wasn’t a hit. I found it confusing and a little choppy in the storyline. I couldn’t really engage with the concept and I did struggle. I stuck with it but I wasn’t overwhelmed. That said I can see for some people this would be an excellent read just not for me. I was disappointed as I was excited to start reading when I was gratefully accepted for ARC for the book but unfortunately it didn’t gel for me.

Oh I was so disappointed in this book!

This is the story of the Alterman family - Fania, Arnold, Sonya and Moses. Living in Vienna at the beginning of the Second World War their lives are fractured. Sonya is placed on a Kindertransport to England, while Arnold gets separated from Fania and Moses when they are rounded up by the Germans.

We first meet Sonya in 1979. Now living in Britain, she has suffered further tragedy as her family never joined her and she was informed that they were all dead. She has grown up, married and had a child, who also dies. We meet her at the point where he daughter is dead and her husband is unravelling. He ups and disappears one day and Sonya retraces the past to try and find him but he is always one step ahead of her and she has always 'just missed him.'

Fania, meanwhile, appears in Montreal in 1969 working as a masseuse in a high class hotel and giving English speaking lessons to a man called Hermann. She and Hermann become good friends and eventually marry and move to Florida. Fania meets a woman at the hotel who she believes is her from the past - they even appear to have the same named husband and children of the same age...however, all is not as it seems and Fania finds her hope being extinguished.

Moses is living in New York in 2016. He has a son who is married to the daughter of Moses' ex girlfriend. Moses has escaped death multiple times, including during an uprising where he and some activist friends had attacked some tanks. His best friend was killed and now Moses inexplicably finds himself haunted by this friends death as the ghost of his friends pleads with him to take him back to Vienna. It takes two years before Moses returns to his past and there he starts to come undone.

Arnold is celebrating his 99th birthday in Vienna in 2002. He believes his family are all long dead. He meets a young lady who tells him she had had a DNA test and found his birth mother. He decides to have a test too and finds that he has a living daughter in Britain. They make contact and arrange to meet up. However, she never arrives and there are an endless array of excuses as to why she hasn't shown up. He makes friends at the train station and a whole crowd of people wait with him for days on end. We then discover that the people and the test are all in Arnold's mind and none of them really exist.

This is a complex novel that explores people's different reactions to grief and death. Grief is presented as people being in different rooms, they can be heard and sometimes glimpsed but never actually come across each other. This is a multiverse type story, where the dead and living exist in different timelines and worlds.

I struggled with this novel as it is so heavy and confusing. Each person doesn't have their own voice - they all sound the same and I struggled to work out whose story I was reading - I ended up having to take notes. I found it extremely confusing and dark and depressing and I came so close to giving up on the story.

I know that some people will love this book, but for me it was just not what I had hoped.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for the honest review.

Unfortunately this book was just not for me. The story was so confusing and made no sense and the writing style didn't help at all. This was like reading a stream of consciousness from the mind of someone who was catatonic. It felt never ending and I never made sense of any perspective.

Here’s a completely reworded version of your review, keeping the meaning and tone intact while presenting it with fresh language and structure:

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It’s hard to capture the essence of this extraordinary novel with a single descriptor. It’s luminous and labyrinthine, contemplative and disorienting, both intellectually exhilarating and emotionally unsettling. Unique in execution and scope, this is a work that defies categorization—utterly original in its vision and voice.

At its center is the Alterman family of Vienna: Fania and Arnold, their daughter Sonja, and infant son Moses. With the Nazi threat looming, Sonja is placed on a Kindertransport to Britain, separated from her family for what she believes will be forever. She grows up convinced that her parents and brother were murdered shortly after her departure.

But that certainty begins to unravel. Could her family have survived? Is she herself alive, or has existence split into unknowable fragments? The narrative toys with the boundaries of time, memory, and mortality, suggesting a universe that is never fixed—always collapsing and being rebuilt, with lives reconfigured in echoes and shadows of their former selves.

The novel unfolds through the refracted voices of each family member, now scattered across different timelines and emotional dimensions. Fania resurfaces in Montreal, unexpectedly encountering a woman whose life mirrors her own. Arnold, on the verge of turning 100, experiences a sudden shift in perception after a fleeting encounter with a stranger. Moses, no longer an infant, is haunted—literally—by the loss of his closest friend. And Sonja, now a musicologist, grapples with the disappearance of her husband, a famed conductor, all while her own reality begins to dissolve.

Each character exists in a splintered, solitary future—a place where they wrestle with what has been taken from them and what might have been. Their longing for alternate outcomes, for impossible reunions, saturates the narrative with a grief so profound it distorts time and space. Stuart Nadler captures this beautifully when he writes, “Everyone has been survived into separate futures and I would never see any of them again… I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would never be able to cross over to meet them.”

This is ultimately a meditation on grief as a kind of imaginative endurance—a reshaping of those we’ve lost into new versions, invented to fill the silence where memory ends. It's about love persisting beyond history, reimagined in the hope of redemption. Nadler doesn’t offer clear answers, only questions that echo: Can we be both gone and present at once? Is grief a doorway into alternate realities, or simply the mind’s refusal to accept an unbearable truth?

Whether read as philosophical inquiry, speculative fiction, or intimate family drama, this novel lingers. It doesn’t offer comfort, but it does offer recognition—of the way love survives, fractured but fierce, in the stories we tell to keep the lost close.

An interesting take on people looking for their connections after the Second World War. It took me a while to get into the story but it was a thought provoking read.

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.

This rather long, perhaps too long, book asks the existential question is death real? Presenting several different answers in which any, all, or none could be real via multiple povs, timelines and realities certainly demonstrates brilliance on behalf of the author but made for hard reading, dare I use the word “slog”. I gave up try to figure out the answers to grief and simply tried to navigate my way to the end. One thing I know was real is the emotional intensity in this book. This was too much like hard work to be enjoyable for me but I can appreciate the genius behind the artistry,

Whilst the concept of this book really intrigued me, the execution ruined it for me.

You can understand the emotion and the frustration of the various family members who are struggling with grief mixed with the not knowing, but the writing was just a bit of a slog. The author darts between different people's POV which overcomplicated things for me.

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.

This is not a novel for the faint-hearted! I have spent quite a while thinking about how to review this book and am still no further forward so here goes!
A Jewish family is torn apart in WWII. The novel follows each family member through a series of their relections and musings across a number of different realities and timelines so that the reader is never sure what is real and what isn't. It is very cleverly written and explores the impact of grief, sometimes in a way that was difficult to follow. This book took me over a week to read which is an indicator of how heavy a read it was. Am I glad I read it? Yes. Did I really understand it - the jury is still out!

his 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.

Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler is an evocative and haunting exploration of loss, survival, and the psychological impact of war on a Jewish family fractured by time and tragedy. Set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this book spans decades and continents, following the Alterman family as they navigate their separate, sorrow-filled futures, haunted by grief and the ghosts of their loved ones.

The story is told through the experiences of four family members—Sonja, Fania, Moses, and Arnold—who each grapple with the loss of their relatives in different ways. The novel begins with Sonja, sent to Britain on the Kindertransport during the war, under the belief that her family will follow. However, they never do, and she is left to build a life with her husband and daughter, only to experience further tragedy when her daughter dies at a young age. Her husband's disappearance after he believes he has seen a grown-up version of their daughter adds another layer of loss to her life.

Fania, the mother, lives in Montreal, where she encounters a woman who may be a doppelganger of herself or someone who moved into their family’s Viennese apartment after their deportation. Meanwhile, Moses, the son, is haunted by the ghost of his best friend and makes his way back to Prague, hoping to make peace with the past. Lastly, Arnold, the father, is 99 years old and receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be his daughter, Sonja, leading him to question the fate of his family.

Each family member is trapped in their own version of the past, with memories and ghosts continuing to shape their existence. The novel navigates a maze of grief, blending memory and reality, leaving readers to wonder if these characters are truly alive or simply living in the madness of their grief. Nadler’s writing is both beautiful and unsettling, capturing the aching hope that something, anything, might bring these fractured lives back together. The exploration of the psychological effects of war and the trauma of survival is profound and deeply moving.

Nadler’s narrative spans time periods and locations, with societal upheaval always at the heart of each character’s journey. The book’s haunting atmosphere is punctuated by moments of hope and despair, leaving readers to reflect on the devastating impact of war and the complex nature of human resilience. The story is at times hard to bear, but its emotional depth and exquisite prose make it a remarkable achievement.

What kept me turning the pages was the sense that, somehow, despite the overwhelming odds, the Alterman family might reconnect. That hope, however fragile, made the novel impossible to put down. Rooms for Vanishing is a poignant meditation on grief, survival, and the ghosts that linger long after the bodies are gone.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.