Nadler, Stuart: Rooms for Vanishing

In the summer of 1938, Sonja is lifted onto a Kindertransport train that will take her from Nazi-occupied Austria to London. She leaves behind her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses. She is the only member of her family to survive. In 1966 Fania is working as a massage therapist in Montreal, a country that provided her safe haven after she lost her entire family in the second world war. And yet there are strange echoes, impressions, of those she loves everwhere she turns. Has she lost her mind or is her family still alive? In 21st century Vienna, Arnold receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be his long-lost daughter, Sonja. Daring to believe that she survived, Arnold waits for her at the train station. Finally, in New York, 2002, Moses is haunted by the ghost of his best friend who was killed in the Prague Spring, and who exhorts Moses to return to Prague to make peace for the dead. Moving from world war two to 2016, between Vienna and Prague, London and Montreal, New York and Miami, Rooms for Vanising is the story of a family blown apart and across the globe by war. They each believe that they are the sole survivor, and maybe they are, because this is a novel of maybe-lived lives, parallel worlds and possibilities, and one populated by ghosts. Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the collisions between desire and reality, memory and facts; it is a singular work that masterfully reimagines the lost possibilities of history itself.