Rooms for Vanishing
the breathtaking WWII historical epic
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'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
For fans of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Rooms for Vanishing is an epic novel of grief and hope and one family blown apart - across the globe, across time, across parallel possibilities - by war.
For the Alterman family, Fania and Arnold, and their children Sonja and Moses, the universe has been fractured.
In 1938 Sonja is lifted onto a Kindertransport train that will take her from Nazi-occupied Austria to London. She is the only member of her family to survive.
In 1966 Fania works as a massage therapist in Montreal, a place that has provided her safe haven after she lost her entire family in the war.
In 2016 Arnold lives out the last of his days and the last memories he has of his family in the city he has always called home.
And in 2000, Moses awaits the birth of his grandson, unaware that the strings that tie him to his past are being drawn tighter and tighter.
Surely none of these realities co-exist, and yet they seem to be drawing closer . . .
Moving between Vienna and Prague, London and Montreal, New York and Miami, Stuart Nadler's Rooms for Vanishing is a spellbinding exploration of what might happen when grief and hope collide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nadler (Wise Men) follows a Viennese Jewish family shattered by the Holocaust across four alternate timelines in his dazzling latest. In each of the four narrative threads, a different member of the Alterman family is the sole survivor. The first, set in 1979 London, focuses on Sonja, rescued from the war at age five by the Kindertransport train. She's married to Franz, a famous orchestra conductor, with whom she lost a young daughter to a terminal illness. Franz disappears after becoming convinced the girl is still alive. Nadler then turns to Sonja's mother, Fania, who survived a displaced persons camp somewhere in Europe and now works as a masseuse in 1966 Montreal. In the third timeline, Fania's younger son, Moses, an infant when the family was rounded up by the Nazis, narrowly escapes being killed during an anti-communist protest in 1960s' Prague. While Moses awaits the birth of his grandchild in 2000 New York City, the ghost of a friend begs him to return to Prague. The final iteration centers on Fania's husband, Arnold, who lives in Vienna in 2016. He receives a message from a woman claiming to be Sonja after she tracks him down via the DNA test he shared on an ancestry site. Throughout, Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters' sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder.
