Munich Airport

by Greg Baxter

  —New Yorker

  “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.”

  —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “The shadows of James Joyce and Ulysses loom over THE APARTMENT as Baxter takes us on an elaborate and riveting one-day ride down our hero’s rapids-racked stream of consciousness. He pounds the icy pavement of the city with a young woman named Saskia. Memories—some sanguine, others violent—spiral through the un-chaptered (and nearly dialogue-free) text. Baxter’s ear for detailed, unpredictable inner dialogue is keen. He guides us with precision and nuance through this man’s mind, a prickled fog where anxiety and resentment and optimism and guilt swirl together in a solo conversation that builds carefully and deliberately…Violence, lurking offstage throughout the story, makes a shocking entrance near the end, setting in place everything that’s come before. The effect is devastating, in the most satisfying way.”

  —Denver Post

  “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.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “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.”

  —Esquire

  “‘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.”

  —Chicago Tribune

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

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “An elegant portrait of a man half-fractured, half-intact—a postwar somebody caught between repair and capitulation, controlling his own fate and imprisoned by regret.”

  —Texas Observer

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Chapter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author Q&A

  Reading Group Guide

  By the same author

  Acclaim for THE APARTMENT by Greg Baxter

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Grand Central Publishing Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Greg Baxter

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Anne Twomey

  Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Originally published in the UK by Penguin Group, July 2014. This Grand Central Publishing edition is published by arrangement with Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, United Kingdom.

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  First ebook edition: January 2015

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  ISBN 978-1-4555-5794-3

  E3