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Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel Audiobook
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A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds
Everyone had been survived into different futures and I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.
In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband, who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelgänger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend; and, finally, Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her.
Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing is a singular work that explores how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.
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"In Rooms for Vanishing, one of Stuart Nadler’s characters, a murdered poet, describes the afterlife as “an everlasting dispatch from a world in which events occur to a world where everything has already happened.” This book, life-affirming and death-drenched, devastating and delightful, is, I think, a sort of mirror image to the murdered poet’s portrayal: this novel feels as though it is a dispatch from a world where everything has already happened to a world, our world, where events occur. Rooms for Vanishing is a phantasmagorical portrait of violence and time, a detailed and patient cosmology of ghosts. In it, Jewish history, the multiverse, human-made catastrophes, small moments of incandescent decency, vertiginous absurdity and naked longing all weave together. Undergirding the resultant tapestry, I located a strange, excruciating sort of peace, one that arises from waiting, praying, for a different past to unspool itself into a more bearable future. Of course, it cannot do so, but the act of reading, of waiting, of praying, alongside these characters, feels somehow transformative. So this book: might it make the agonized future more bearable? I think it might. I wept, real tears, at least seven times reading this novel, and I intend to return to these pages often."
— Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World and Sadness Is a White Bird
Quotes
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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 -
With masterful precision and an eye flecked with mysticism, Nadler gently peels the first layer off the world, loosens the voices that roam underneath, and from a place so far away it might be an afterlife he writes these voices back from oblivion. Nadler is a genius. Rooms for Vanishing is the book of my dreams.
— Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily, Wild Milk, and others -
Reading Rooms for Vanishing feels like peering into a small window and discovering the whole universe. Past and present, what is missing and what is here, the finite facts and the infinite truth. This is a novel that aches with the possibility of retrieving what was lost, of seeing in body what exists so clearly in the heart.
— Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal -
Reading Rooms for Vanishing feels like peering into a small window and discovering the whole universe. Past and present, what is missing and what is here, the finite facts and the infinite truth. This is a novel that aches with the possibility of retrieving what was lost, of seeing in body what exists so clearly in the heart.
— Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal -
[A]n epic puzzle box of a novel, exploring the profoundly destabilizing power of grief and loss.
— Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025" -
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 -
Dazzling... Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters’ sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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About Stuart Nadler
Stuart Nadler is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Nadler was also the 2008/9 Carol Houck-Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Wise Men.
About the Narrators
Bruce Mann, Earphones Award–winning narrator,studied classical acting at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and has been a successful voice-over artist and actor for over ten years.
Kathleen Gati is an award-winning actress who has starred in a number of Hungarian television series and films.
Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their “Best Voices of the Year.” He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
Orlagh Cassidy, an American actress of stage, television, and film, is an audiobook narrator who has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, as well as many AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is a graduate of SUNY at Purchase and a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Scholarship. She has been seen on and off Broadway and in films, including Definitely Maybe and Calling It Quits. Her television credits include roles in Law & Order and Sex and the City and as Doris Wolfe on Guiding Light.