The apartment

the long version

"One snowy holiday 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. Told with an affecting and intimate tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama, THE APARTMENT follows the couple across a vague and frozen city on a single day, into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaving them at the doorstep of an uncertain future. A complex meditation on America's relationship with a new Europe that ingeniously measures our feeble attempts to cure violence with violence, Baxter's clear-eyed first novel provides an unflinching portrait of the ways that guilt shapes us, and demonstrates an ultimately redemptive faith in the alchemies and uncertainties of friendship and love"-- ""A powerful and elegant debut novel about love, memory, exile, and war."