The Apartment

(Paperback)

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Description

An acclaimed first novel about the costs of war and the mysteries of friendship One snowy morning in an old European capital, a man wakes in a hotel room. A young local woman he has befriended calls to the hotel, and the two of them head out into the snow to find the man an apartment to rent. Greg Baxter's astonishing first novel tells the story of these two people on this day - and the old stories that brought them to where they are. Its magically subtle and intense narrative takes them across the frozen city and into the past that the man is hoping to escape, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future. The Apartment is a book 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.

Reviews

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 4 *
Imagine you're on a roller-coaster ... suddenly, without warning, it tips vertiginously, so quickly that your chest constricts and while you're there, suspended, momentarily, at the apex of this roller-coaster, you're aware suddenly of a kind of clarity, a totally new perspective on everything below. Greg Baxter's The Apartment is a bit like this ... Full of unshowy wisdom and surprising moments of beauty * Sunday Telegraph *
Baxter's superbly elegant, understated writing explores the dynamics of America's relationship with the rest of the world * The Times *
A wonderful, horrible, wise novel * Dazed & Confused (Book of the Month) *
His protagonist is not merely struggling beneath the weight of the violence in his own life story; he grapples with the larger sense of history that infuses the text with an effect that recalls WG Sebald. ... There's a maturity to The Apartment not often found in debut novels. -- Lucy Scholes * The Independent *
An interesting, honourable novel -- James Lasdun * The Guardian *
A writer of considerable gifts ... Baxter, who now lives in Berlin, is so good at conjuring up the atmosphere of his chilly and crowded city (probably Eastern European and probably fictional) and the character of its inhabitants that you come to feel that you're living there among them in their noisy, bustling cafes and their freezing thoroughfares. ... Baxter shows mastery, too, in his vividly realised characters, especially the charming Saskia * Irish Independent *
Impressive ... The language is tight, with each word weighted and anything showy or extraneous rigidly excluded * Dubliner *
Contains moments of shocking impact, set out vividly against the palely drawn background. * TLS *
A remarkably assured and often poetic piece of work * Hot Press *
A terse and subtle tour-de-force * Cara *
A slim but sure tale of love, death and imperialism * RTE Guide *
A quietly compelling and provocative work * Sunday Business Post *
A dark and sinewy novel, written with sparse clarity and affecting subtlety -- Stuart Evers * Observer Books of the Year *
In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel - small enough to stuff in a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch * Entertainment Weekly *
A novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb. ... It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. ... With elegant restraint, Baxter layers the narratives, anecdotes and experiences in the manner of life as continuous essay, the topic of which might be stated as, "What is a right way to be in the world" ... It is very much to Baxter's credit that he presents this struggle as if it were thriller, love story, philosophical novel and dark comedy combined, in a novel not liek a bullet but like an arrow flying straight to the heart of the matter. * New York Times Book Review *
A quiet and powerful read through and through. Baxter's clean and direct prose generates its own momentum. He chooses not to create a tidy drama where characters are explained by their pasts. Rather, he creates something bigger and more true. * Daily Beast *
Compelling ... captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new "lost generation", one formed not so much by exposure to violence, as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter's world, home, it seems, is no place. * New York Times *
Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic ... With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W.G. Sebald * Los Angeles Times *

Author Bio

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.