Munich Airport

ACCLAIM FOR THE APARTMENT "Baxter has written 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."

"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... Baxter's provocative, unsettling novel is, among other things, about the inexorability of identity and 'the immortality of violence.'"

"It is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author's shimmering prose, that makes THE APARTMENT such a surprisingly compelling read and so apropos; it 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."

"In this bleak but affecting novel, an unnamed American expat spends a day walking through a frigid, unidentified European city in search of an apartment...The details of his day are rendered with anaesthetized precision and achieve a cumulative force of grief, equanimity, and resolve."

"A true gem... Lucid, often hypnotic and, at times, even transporting. [Baxter] keeps his sentences short, his adjectives limited, his pacing leisurely. The paragraphs are long and there are no chapter breaks, yet his acute observation means this is no mere minimalist undertaking... The Iraq sections are astonishingly well done, and the man's history as a Naval officer feels almost exactly right to the former Naval officer who happens to be writing this review."

"In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel - small enough to fit into a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch."

"In just over 200 pages, The Apartment impressively and tactfully covers everything from the effects of American interventionism on its relationship with Europe to questions of personal identity."

"'I was born to hate the place I came from.' Greg Baxter's first novel THE APARTMENT is a short but powerful exploration of that sentiment, uttered halfway through the novel by its narrator, a 41-year-old American ex-Navy officer and Iraq War veteran."

"A beautiful meditation on brutality and culture, which are sometimes one and the same."

"An elegant portrait of a man half-fractured, half-intact-a post-war somebody caught between repair and capitulation, controlling his own fate and imprisoned by regret."

"In the layered narratives of Baxter's piercing first novel, a young American returned from Iraq struggles to find a new life in Europe."