This is the story of a Jewish family torn apart by the Second World War. It’s like surrealist art, rather than a photograph, an imaging of what life should have been like rather than how it was. I found it hard to follow, although beautifully written.

With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

I dithered long and hard before requesting this book, in part because it was compared to Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See, which I hated. I didn't hate this one, but I did find it hard going and it's taken me the better part of a month to get through it.

It is structured in sections narrated by four different people (or perhaps more?), members of one Jewish family shattered and fragmented during the war. In 1938 Arnold and Fania read the signs and put their 5-year-old daughter Sonja on a Kindertransport train to England. They are rounded up soon afterwards, and Arnold is taken outside and summarily shot while baby Moses, only six months old, is torn from Fania's arms never to be seen again.
But is this what really happened? Or is it only one of several possible realities? Has the inconceivable, unimaginably huge grief and trauma suffered by this family - and all the other families who suffered a similar fate - fragmented their realities, and their spirits, and their histories, to the extent that each individual life has been fragmented to reflect this?
This is, I think, what is being explored here. The narrative structure is every bit as fragmented, with sections alternating between the voices of each of these four people who all seem to have survived in some form, but who at best coexist in parallel realities which mean each can only catch glimpses or whispers of the others. And as the novel progresses towards the latter sections, even the relationships between people with the same names become less and less clear.
As a literary representation of grief and destruction, this novel is an original and innovative voice, a visceral depiction using technique to represent what words alone cannot. As a reading experience though, it's pretty hard work. There came a point when the narrative became so bewildering that I became disengaged. Which of course may also be a representation of the way in which the world at large could not or would not comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust. It's clever, no question, but one to embark upon with some caution.

I requested this book as I thought it sounded intriguing. The writing is poetic and at times beautiful but I found it hard to get into. The time lines were a little confusing.

There was so much to like about the concept of this book, the idea that lives were led that were lost and that people remain haunted by their experiences, but overall it is a very tough book to read, so complicated and slow that it becomes harder to appreciate the craft that has gone into it. I did struggle with the complexities of the plot and although I really tried, could not fully engage with it and did not enjoy.

This is a strange and often confusing book. It flits between eras and potential endings which makes it difficult to follow. Any novel involving family separation, the Holocaust and untimely death is heartbreaking. And this is a tale of humanity, which will bring tears to your eyes. In saying all of that, the philosophical idea that life and death are just different rooms is intriguing. And Stuart does give some useful incites into his views on the subject which is interesting. I did in the end finish reading it. If you like to read about the tragedy of this time, can look beyond the speculation, and enjoy philosophy it is worth reading.
Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for allowing me to read it. The views expressed are my own and they are given freely.

The premise of this novel intrigued me very much. However, the layout of the proof copy meant I could not concentrate on the text so reading was difficult.

Stuart Nadler's Rooms for Vanishing takes a while to come into focus. When it does this book turns out to be an almost experiemental and speculative take on the Holocaust and its impacts.
The book opens with Sonja, living in London in 1979. Sonja was part of the kindertransport, evacuated from Vienna when she was five, leaving her parents and baby brother behind and taken to London. She later finds out that her family were all killed by the Nazies. Forty years later she is still mourning the loss of her daughter to some disease (probably cancer) five years before when her husband Franz goes missing. Sonja's daughter before she died had claimed she could commune with Sonja's mother Fania who was just "in a different room" and when her husband goes missing it appears he has gone searching for the ghost of their daughter. The story then moves back to 1966 and is about Fania but in this reality, she was the only survivor of the family, Sonja having died on the kindertransport. Nadler then moves to Moses (the baby of the family now about to be a grandfather) and Arnold (the father) and tells different stories in which they were the only survivors.
Structurally this is an interesting approach - coneptually these are different realities that sometimes can break through to each other. There are ghosts in all of them and some rules that define how those ghosts can operate. But ultimately this does not work. While the individual stories are interesting there is not enough connection between them. So that the book is essentially plot free, there is nothing driving the reader to find out more except maybe a broad interest in the subject matter. And while that subject matter - the Holocaust and its continuing echoes through time - is important, this vehicle does not do it enough justice.

Although I was drawn to the intriguing idea of the “alternative endings” from the blurb I’m afraid I really didn’t enjoy this book and didn’t feel that the writing flowed. It was very confused and difficult to care about any of the characters.

DNFd at 17%. There will be many readers who will appreciate the lyricism of the writing in this Holocaust novel. An ingenious device is used to tell the story of one family with each narrative from each character revealing an alternative reality where each of them is the sole survivor of the family. However, I found the prose quite spare and poetic which is not a style which works well for me. I felt removed rather than connected to the tragedy of their stories because of the poetic style and I wanted to feel more engaged in their thoughts and feelings than I was. If you are a fan of poetry and space for the unsaid I think this book would be a beautiful read.
This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

This is a high concept book with an interesting structure. What would have happened to 4 members of a family had they survived the Holocaust? The author writes about 4 different family members in different countries and situations at different points of their potential lives.

What is the effect of trauma and intergenerational trauma? Sonja survived in one part as she got on the Kindertransport to England. hers is the nearest to the war in terms of chronology. Fania is a masseuse who ironically can heal other people's pain. She thinks she sees her husband Arnold, who appears in another segment .

Moses is in the USA awaiting the birth of his grandson which brings existential thoughts to him.

In all the stories characters have "hallucinations" where they see their dead family members or in one plot actually are accompanied by the Dead. I found it all very elusive and hard to grasp. I think that reflects the grief process itself as there's never an obvious, straightforward path through it and you struggle to find any meaning in the loss. Often you do think you've seen the dead person or believe strongly they are somewhere hidden from you- especially when you've not seen the person's body.

Multiply a normal grieving process by many times due to the traumatic nature of the losses and you will struggle with it more and that process is reflected in this book. I did struggle with it personally and found I had to keep putting it down and the resolving to finish it.

Skilful and tragic.

What to expect:
- A hard hitting family saga filled with depth across multiple POV with a completely unique structure.

What hit hard:
- The writing was absolutely stunning and the sentence structure/word choices completely lyrical. The writing is beautiful.
- I really love the concept of the book and the way the style almost felt like a metaphor for grief.

What didn’t quite work for me (so might be worth keeping in mind):
- The way the POV were done was a little too in between in terms of when it switched for me. I prefer either alternating chapters or a longer period with each character before it switches whereas I found I got just long enough to get into that person and then it was like starting again. This became easier as the book went on and I knew each character selection however I did just find it made the first half hard to get into.
- One thing that I did find with the concept was while I really loved the idea and thought behind it. In practice it did get a bit confusing at times.

You’ll love this if you love:
- Really thought provoking emotive stories with beautiful atmospheric writing.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC .

I don’t think anyone who has not suffered loss because of the Holocaust, 7/ll, 7/7, the Birmingham bombing and many other traumatic and terrible events, can appreciate the devastation caused by such losses. Nor the hope embedded in the grief - the prayers that the family members have survived, somewhere, somehow.
Ghosting is a known occurrence after loss, as is seeing doppelgangers: how to know what is true or real when desperate to believe what you think you see?
This is a tough, emotional read, beautifully executed.

Rooms for Vanishing is a novel, surreal take on the family saga - a haunting story of grief, trauma, history and possibility.

When war comes to Vienna, the Altermans, a Jewish Austrian family are brutally separated. Five-year-old Sonja is dispatched to England on a Kindertransport train while her parents, Fania and Arnold, are sent to the death camps. Baby Moses, just six months old, is wrenched from his mother's arms.

Years later, as the world recovers and reconstructs itself and the surviving Jews of Europe live scattered far from their homelands, each of the Altermans inhabits a separate future, sure that they are the only one left and - in the case of the children - having few memories of the time before. Separated by continents and decades, we see Sonja in 1979 London, reeling from the loss of her own young daughter and searching for her missing husband, who is convinced that she is still alive. In 1966 Montreal, Fania meets Hermann, a fellow Viennese refugee, and wonders if it could be possible to find a path through the grief which still consumes her. In 2000 New York City, Moses, now an old man himself, awaits the birth of his first grandchild. In 2016 Vienna, Arnold celebrates his ninety-ninth birthday and reflects on all that he has witnessed over almost a century of living. Each character imagines the paths the others' lives might have taken if they had lived, as well as how their own lives might have been different if they had made different choices.

Each character has their own distinct narrative voice, and their timelines are populated with well-drawn, fully-realised supporting characters, from Jonathan, the devoted assistant to Sonja's mecurial composer husband to charming, witty Hermann and whip-smart, no-nonsense Žofie, Moses' erstwhile lover. Author Stuart Nadler clearly relishes choosing the perfect words to capture a place, a moment or a feeling: Sonja's toxic dynamic with her husband is 'ruinous and dejecting', while his laugh is described as 'a baleful and glassy and vindictive piece of lordliness. In a book which music is used as an important motif, he even gleefully includes Sonja describing Mozart et al as 'this dead-men parade of ghoulish ivory tickling.'

Music plays an important part in each timeline, and it is used to create narrative cohesion as well as explore several disparate ideas: how a piece of music can sound beautifully and yet be so awfully sad that one cannot bear to listen to it; how it was taken from the Jews as part of the process of dehumanising them; how it evokes guilt in those who play when others cannot, when terrible events continue to unfold unceasingly around the world.

The novel deploys an unusual, sometimes bewildering, structure, taking vast leaps across time and space and having the reader guess at events that transpired in the intervening years. It isn't a quick or easy read, thanks to dense symbolism and its non-linear chronology, but it is one of the most profound pieces of contemporary fiction I have come across. If you are willing to invest the time in Rooms for Vanishing, you will come away with a far greater understanding of mid-century European politics (and the inexorable themes of prejudice, persecution and exile that dominate history) and Jewish diaspora trauma, and you will have explored some great questions on the nature of life and loss.

Each character battles with the draw of returning to - or at least revisiting - their homeland versus the horror of having to confront places which were once safe but could ultimately offer no protection from the evil with a human face which stalked Europe, as well as the fact that much of the culture and history which they attach to these nations was long ago eradicated. They wonder too if it is better to seek definitive answers as to their loved ones' fates or to comfort themselves by imagining brighter futures for those who vanished.

Each of the characters is haunted, both by the actual loss of their loved ones and by the snatched potential of their stolen lives, and the author has this manifest differently for each of them: some are consumed by their memories; others encounter their doppelganger or are stalked by the mournful ghost of a lost friend. We are left wondering which timeline, if any, is real. Who is alive and who is a ghost or a manifestation of memory? Each narrative seems plausible, replete with its own struggles, successes and tragedies, but given that at least 60,000 Austrian Jews were murdered by the Nazis (almost all who didn't emigrate before the outbreak of war), the reader must accept the possibility that none of that which we read is true; it is all a fantasy of what might have been. It is a bold choice by Nadler to leave us wondering.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Published next week this is a wonderfully written Jewish story through human made catastrophes of our history and of family ghosts to the various narrators.
It took me a while to find my way through the family but the book is plotted in different sections and years which add to the timeline.
It crosses from Vienna - through Kindertransport- London- New York with an almost musical metaphor for the joining of various characters as Sonia, Moses and Arnold.
You do have to suspend your reality check as the plots are interwoven with many unworldly images - "What happened to the first you?" perhaps sums up the arc of the tales from each family member well.
The afterlife is "news from home" and comes to link what was lost, killed or destroyed by cruelty, war, time or age.
All have the same story but tell it differently to fill in the gas of others.
There is a transience of time with a word, a look, a painting, a musical composition and this adds to the lyrical and mysterious depths of the book.

I would never have picked this myself as I am not a fan of fantasy but I think the author has 'crossed' the bridge from fantasy to fact to make the stories believable and also adds a new dimension to the tales of Jewish persecution that is perhaps needed today.

Fania and Arnold, and their children Sonja and Moses are the Alterman family but life in the universe has stalled.

In 1938 Sonja takes a Kindertransport train out of Austria to London and will be the only member of her family to survive.
in 1966 Fania is working in Montreal after losing all her family in the war.
in 2016 Arnold is coming to the end of his life with his family.
Moses is now waiting for his grandson to be born.

What is real and what is not?

I really enjoyed this story. The pacing kept me turning the pages, and I felt invested in the characters from the start. Thank you to the writer, publisher, and NetGalley for letting me read this book.

This book had some of the most beautiful use of adjectives I have ever read. It's an incredibly ambitious piece, with stunning writing, yet it is bleak.

Survivors of WW2 talk about their experiences, all at different points in their lives. However, the story is quite disjointed. Are some dead? Are they all in alternative universes? The idea of the trains and rooms connecting them all is wonderful, but coming from different narrators, it can feel incoherent and frustrating. I understand that this is the intended affect from the author, showing the confusion of grief, but it sometimes feel a little too confusing.

I definitely recommend, but this won't be picked up again for a re-read.

Gosh this was a hard read. I was really looking forward to reading it as it sounded so intriguing but I found the execution didn't work. The writing doesn't flow and it's hard to keep track of the dialogue.

I really tried to love this as the blurb sounded like a beautiful but harrowing story.

Sadly, whilst I found parts of it poetically well written, I found it very hard to parse where I was in the universe timeline, and sadly the lack of punctuation for showing dialogue made things much harder than it ought to be.

I’ll come back with a fresh mind in a week or so and try and finish, I’d like to see how things resolve.

“Rooms for Vanishing” tells the story of one Jewish family torn apart by the Holocaust. They each think the others have died and you see how this experience influences the rest of their lives.

I really wanted to love this book but I found it difficult to read especially the more it went on. The way the story is written, you’re never sure whether the characters and the people they interact with are alive or dead. While some may find this intriguing (and I have seen other reviews say they loved this aspect) I just found it confusing. I also struggled to emotionally engage with the characters which you wouldn’t expect from a book with this sort of subject matter, and I put this down to it chopping and changing too much between the different characters points of view. I am used to books which hop around but I think this book would’ve benefited from telling one story at a time.

It’s an interesting perspective on the Holocaust, the twentieth and twenty first century, families, relationships and grief but it just wasn’t for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.