The Apartment
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
The Apartment, the astonishing first novel by Greg Baxter, is a tale of war and peace, friendship and aloneness.
A man walks across an old European capital. Heavy snow falls. He has come here from far away, hoping to forget. Instead, he remembers: home, war, lost friends. Complicity. In the company of a new friend and alive to the new experiences of the city, he moves through the snow and his complicated history in search of an apartment.
The Apartment, by the author of the acclaimed memoir A Preparation for Death, is a novel about war, the relationship between America and the rest of the world, and the brittle foundations of Western culture; but above all it is a book about the mysteries and alchemies of friendship - truthful, moving and brilliant. Acclaimed by Hisham Matar, Adam Thorpe and Roddy Doyle, among others, The Apartment is a deeply original and profoundly involving novel.
'Admirable for its scope, ambition and unashamed seriousness of purpose, as well as its willingness to take stylistic and structural risks' Julie Myerson, Observer
'Stunningly good' Susan Jeffreys, Saturday Review, BBC Radio Four
'Baxter's superbly elegant, understated writing explores the dynamics of America's relationship with the rest of the world' The Times
'Lucidly written and astutely observed ... The novel exerts a hypnotic force ... Baxter continually undercuts our expectations for his novel. And it is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author's shimmering prose, that makes The Apartment such a surprisingly compelling read' New York Times
'Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic ... Its long, frigid journey into a long, sleepless night explores a man's uneasy relationship with his past, himself and a world in which violence is inescapable' Los Angeles Times
'Powerful ... Baxter's clean and direct prose generates its own momentum' Daily Beast
'A wonderful, horrible, wise novel' Dazed & Confused (Book of the Month)
'A dark and sinewy novel, written with sparse clarity and affecting subtlety' Stuart Evers, Observer (Books of the Year)
Greg Baxter was born in Texas in 1974. He lived for a number of years in Dublin, and now lives in Berlin. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir A Preparation for Death. The Apartment is his first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Navy veteran in his early 40s who has made big money working as a military contractor in Iraq explores an unnamed European city with a possibly romantically inclined local woman, Saskia, in this intriguing debut novel from Baxter, author of the memoir A Preparation for Death. In the course of one day spent searching for an apartment, the anonymous narrator looks back on his role in the American military and his own rather conventional brand of cowardice and hypocrisy: "I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist... And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel." This sensitive, unassuming book is notable for its exploration of the basic disparity between the idea of American power and how it is actually manifested in the world in this case, through the self-admittedly "contemptible" functionary who finds himself seeking an alternate reality in an unfamiliar place, but seems destined to remain "a citizen of resignation." Where the novel shines most is in the telling the slow, deliberate narrative unfolds like a quiet symphony, and Baxter's prose lingers inexplicably, like a beautifully sad song.