Good morning everyone and happy Tuesday. Today on Two For Tuesday I’m featuring two books I’ve received from the lovely people at Book Break.
A Beautiful Family is a story about dark family secrets which I always enjoy, while Rooms For Vanishing is a sweeping book following a family after the second world war … Or does it?!? Eek so intrigued!
These both sound brilliant and just my type of book so I’m very excited to read them both soon.
Huge thanks to @bookbreakuk and @panmacmillan for sending these to me.
A Beautiful Family is out on the 19th June 2025 & Rooms For Vanishing is out on the 21st August 2025.
Find out more about the books below ⬇️
A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan
In the past, we had always spent our summer holidays in remote places. That had always been my mother’s preference. This year was different . . .
A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan is a breathtaking novel of family secrets, dark mystery and searing atmosphere that promises to be the standout debut of 2025.
New Zealand, 1985. As the long summer holiday stretches ahead, ten-year-old Alix wants to spend every second on the beach and in the water. But with her parents unusually distracted and her older sister now more interested in boys, she finds herself alone.
Then Alix meets Kahu. He’s on holiday too, and he lets her in on a secret: a few years ago, a little girl went missing and was presumed drowned. But no one ever found her body.
Suddenly, the summer has purpose. The two friends will find the missing girl and become local heroes. But as their investigation progresses, Alix risks uncovering dark secrets about the neighbourhood – and her own beautiful family . . .
Rooms For Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
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 place 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 the Second World War 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.
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