The Apartment

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 &amp; 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.

Admirable for its scope, ambition and unashamed seriousness of purpose, as well as its willingness to take stylistic and structural risks

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

Baxter's superbly elegant, understated writing explores the dynamics of America's relationship with the rest of the world

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.

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

Impressive ... The language is tight, with each word weighted and anything showy or extraneous rigidly excluded

Contains moments of shocking impact, set out vividly against the palely drawn background.

A remarkably assured and often poetic piece of work

A slim but sure tale of love, death and imperialism

A quietly compelling and provocative work

A dark and sinewy novel, written with sparse clarity and affecting subtlety

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Preparation for Death

Brilliant and wonderfully original ... Yes, this is a book about drinking and shagging. But rarely have these things been written about so well

Baxter is a serious, thoughtful writer, bent on emotional truth and artistry. He has written an unusual, provocative book.

The triumph is in the steely courage it takes to put a life down with such uncompromising clarity

Baxter tells his story with a captivating and rare honesty

A sustained and gripping meditation on art and authenticity. ... one  of those books about almost nothing, that manage to be about almost  everything

Brilliant - he writes well about everything ... Could be a classic

Greg Baxter was born in Texas in 1974. For the past ten years he has lived in Dublin, where he works as a journalist.

'Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it ... ' 
 
In his early thirties, Greg Baxter found himself in a strange place. He hated his job, he was drinking excessively, he was sabotaging his most important relationships, and he was no longer doing the thing he cared about most: writing. Strangest of all, at this time he started teaching evening classes in creative writing - and his life changed utterly. 
 
A Preparation for Death is a document of the chaos and discovery of that time and of the experiences that led Greg Baxter to that strange place - an extraordinarily intimate account of literary failure (and its consequences), personal decay, and redemption through reading, writing, and truth-telling. Studded with vivid, loving portraits of the people closest to him - his Austrian grandmother, who narrowly survived the Second World War; his mother and father, both described with heartbreakingly close attention; and his cousin Walter, whose own demons provide a striking counterpoint to the author's - it is above all a stunningly vivid and searching self-portrait: possibly the most honest book you'll ever read.

Greg Baxter

This rich and profound book is full of philosophical ideas and stark, ascetic beauty ... The writing is scrupulous and often superb ... I wholeheartedly recommend Munich Airport to everyone interested in the ongoing and fascinating human conversation that is first-rate fiction

Quiet but mesmeric ... The three central characters are beautifully drawn, their personalities unveiled for us during a series of understated revelations...It is a novel that, without a trace of sentimentality, is about the importance of family, and conversely how the existential loneliness of each of the characters has impoverished their lives

A story ... about the age in which we live, the nature of consumption, and the terrors that beset us and alienate us from ourselves and each other. ... So much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of contemporary fiction

Assured and fluent ... a forensic examination of what it means today to be a man, and to be human

It's a testament to Baxter's skills that so plotless a novel manages to retain such pace and poise...There's something mesmerising about the prose

A writer of courage and lucidity. His fluent and assured prose owes some debt to the Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard. ... Baxter is high literature

Greg Baxter is a writer of style... His proven brand of philosophical literature bypasses current fiction's fad for recklessly baroque construction and aims straight for the higher shelves of the Western canon

Baxter ... deserves to be included with Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk in the current conversation about what fiction can do and where it is going

An American expat in London takes a phone call. The caller is a German policewoman, and the news she has to convey to him is almost incomprehensible: his sister, Miriam, has been found dead in her Berlin flat, of starvation. 
 
Three weeks later, the man, his elderly father, and an American consular official find themselves in a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam's coffin is to be loaded onto a commercial jet. Greg Baxter's extraordinary novel tells the story of these three people over those three weeks of waiting for Miriam's body to be released. 
 
Munich Airport is a novel about the meaning of home, and about the families we improvise when our real families fall apart. It is a gripping, daring and mesmeric read from one of the most gifted young novelists currently at work.

Greg Baxter

Praise for Munich Airport

This rich and profound book is full of philosophical ideas and stark, ascetic beauty ... The writing is scrupulous and often superb ... I wholeheartedly recommend Munich Airport to everyone interested in the ...

Quiet but mesmeric ... The three central characters are beautifully drawn, their personalities unveiled for us during a series of understated revelations...It is a novel that, without a trace of sentimentalit ...

A story ... about the age in which we live, the nature of consumption, and the terrors that beset us and alienate us from ourselves and each other. ... So much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of ...

This rich and profound book is full of philosophical ideas and stark, ascetic beauty ... The writing is scrupulous and often superb ... I wholeheartedly recommend Munich Airport to everyone interested in the ...

Quiet but mesmeric ... The three central characters are beautifully drawn, their personalities unveiled for us during a series of understated revelations...It is a novel that, without a trace of sentimentalit ...

A story ... about the age in which we live, the nature of consumption, and the terrors that beset us and alienate us from ourselves and each other. ... So much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of ...

This rich and profound book is full of philosophical ideas and stark, ascetic beauty ... The writing is scrupulous and often superb ... I wholeheartedly recommend Munich Airport to everyone interested in the ...

Quiet but mesmeric ... The three central characters are beautifully drawn, their personalities unveiled for us during a series of understated revelations...It is a novel that, without a trace of sentimentalit ...

A story ... about the age in which we live, the nature of consumption, and the terrors that beset us and alienate us from ourselves and each other. ... So much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of ...

Books by Greg Baxter

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter