Books in brief: Rooms for Vanishing, Making Matters and The Writers’ Castle

Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler (Picador, £18.99)

In London, 1979, Sonja Alterman’s conductor husband, Franz, is missing. It’s the latest in a series of shattering losses for her that began decades earlier when she was put on to a Kindertransport train in Vienna, never again to see her parents or her baby baby brother, and later continued with the loss of her young daughter to terminal illness. Sorrow weighs heavy throughout Stuart Nadler’s ambitious novel, and it’s deepened rather than alleviated by his commitment to a multiverse in which those other murdered Altermans each become, in turn, the family’s lone survivor.

Making Matters: In Search of Creative Wonders by Clare Hunter (Sceptre, £20)

Sewing and knitting, it was recently reported, are fading skills in the UK – despite all those hipster posts on TikTok. Clare Hunter, however, is out to reclaim the joy of making for the masses, weaving together anecdotes from her experience as a community textile artist with lightly imparted research into an eccentrics-heavy history of homespun endeavour, and a dose of defiance against the screen-driven narrowing of human experience. Sandcastles, paper boats, biscuit-tin pinhole cameras – no act of creativity is too humble, too ephemeral, for this hymn to the sensory wonder and connectivity of the homemade.

The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg by Uwe Neumahr, translated by Jefferson Chase (Pushkin Press, £12.99)

In late 1945, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn and Gregor von Rezzori were among the literary luminaries gathered to report on the Nuremberg trials. The legal proceedings bred boredom and cynicism, as well as boozy bed-hopping at the castle where they were quartered. Uwe Neumahr’s book centres on the authors of history’s first draft rather than the Nazis in the dock, drawing on newly accessed archives alongside their reporting, novels and radio dispatches. Perhaps most compelling is its exploration of the act of writing when words seem so profoundly inadequate.

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