Greg Baxter

From the critically acclaimed author of The Apartment comes a powerful, poetic, and haunting exploration of loss, love, and isolation. An American living in London receives a phone call from a German policewoman telling him the nearly inconceivable news that his sister, Miriam, has been found dead in her Berlin apartment-from starvation. Three weeks later the man, his father, and an American consular official named Trish find themselves in the bizarre surroundings of a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam's coffin is set to be loaded onto a commercial jet and returned to America. Greg Baxter's bold, mesmeric novel tells the story of these three people over the course of three weeks, as they wait for Miriam's body to be released, grieve over her incomprehensible death, and try to possess a share of her suffering--and her yearning and grace. With prose that is tense, precise, and at times highly lyrical, MUNICH AIRPORT is a novel for our time, a work of richness, gravity, and even dark humor. Following his acclaimed American debut, MUNICH AIRPORT marks the establishment of Greg Baxter as an important new voice in literature, one who has already drawn comparisons to masters such as Kafka, Camus, and Murakami.

A Novel

Munich Airport

A powerful and elegant debut novel about love, memory, exile, and war. One snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search for an apartment to rent. THE APARTMENT follows the couple across a blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future-their cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to cure violence with violence. A novel about how our relationships to others-and most importantly to ourselves-alters how we see the world, THE APARTMENT perfectly captures the peculiarity and excitement of being a stranger in a strange city. Written in an affecting and intimate tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama, Greg Baxter's clear-eyed first novel tells the intriguing story of these two people on this single day. Both beguiling and raw in its observations and language, THE APARTMENT is a crisp novel with enormous range that offers profound and unexpected wisdom.

The Apartment

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

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. 'Brilliant and wonderfully original ... Yes, this is a book about drinking and shagging. But rarely have these things been written about so well' William Leith, Literary Review 'Baxter is a serious, thoughtful writer, bend on emotional truth and artistry. He has written an unusual, provocative book' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'Brave, honest and propulsive' Metro 'The triumph is the steely courage it takes to put a life down with such uncompromising clarity' Hugo Hamilton, Irish Times 'This is an occasionally infuriating and completely wonderful book. I read it in one sitting, unsettled and delighted by its ferocity' Anne Enright

Greg Baxter

About

Books

Join the club