Rooms for Vanishing

Reviews

Most Anticipated by LitHub and Our Culture

“Nadler writes in a register of formal mysticism that can be pleasantly sorrowful…there are moments of deep emotion in this ambitious novel.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Nadler develops this melancholy notion with care and solemnity…The novel has the beauty of a dirge.”
—Wall Street Journal

“It’s a multiverse of grief, and Stuart Nadler’s storytelling makes each character come to life, despite their possible death(s)—a wondrous feat.”
—Town & Country

“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)

“Nadler masterfully weaves ghosts, memories, and the exciting yet terrifying possibility they all feel at the prospect of seeing each other again into this oblique, unsettling, and profound exploration of trauma, grief, and familial bonds.”
—Booklist

“[A]n epic puzzle box of a novel, exploring the profoundly destabilizing power of grief and loss.”
—Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

“ [An] ornate tapestry of a novel…One can’t erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work.”
—BookPage

“Through poignant moments of nar­ra­tion, Nadler expert­ly devel­ops the com­plex­i­ty of Jew­ish sur­vival, par­tic­u­lar­ly after the Holo­caust, when the dead can some­times seem as alive as the living.”
—Jewish Book Council

“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

“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

“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 Expand reviews