An acclaimed first novel about the costs of war and the mysteries of friendship
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.
Admirable for its scope, ambition and unashamed seriousness of
purpose, as well as its willingness to take stylistic and
structural risks
*Observer*
Stunningly good
*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.
*The Independent*
An interesting, honourable novel
*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
*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*
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