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Munich Airport
Munich Airport
Nov 11, 2025 1:06 AM

Author:Greg Baxter

Munich Airport

Munich Airport: the brilliant, haunting new novel by Greg Baxter

An American expat in London, about to enter a meeting, takes a phone call. The caller is a German policewoman. The news she has to convey is almost incomprehensible: the man's 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 an almost unbearably strange place: 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, sifting through her possessions, and trying to work out what could have led her to her awful death.

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 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 two previous highly acclaimed books: A Preparation for Death, a memoir, and The Apartment, a novel.

'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.' Guardian

'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' Independent

'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' Irish Times

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

'Honest, bracing and eloquent ... Munich Airport is a brilliant achievement' Wall Street Journal

'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' New York Times

Reviews

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

—— Guardian

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

—— Independent

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

—— Irish Times

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

—— TLS

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

—— Observer

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

—— New York Times

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

—— Barnes and Noble Review

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

—— Brooklyn Magazine

A gripping novel of forbidden passion and intrigue

—— Woman & Home

A thoughtful read

—— HNR

A well-researched page-turner

—— Guardian

Delightfully written with pathos, intrigue and mystery on every page

—— Northern Life Magazine

I devoured it in one sitting and absolutely adored it

—— Sugarscape

Unforgettable . . . I almost cried because all the feelings it made me feel

—— HowlingforBooks

The world needs this book, YOU need this book

—— PopGoesTheReader

Goldsworthy’s mischievous debut updates that constant trope about gaining the world and losing your soul in a contemporary London setting that is two parts Bulgakov to one part Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill

—— Michael Conaghan , Belfast Telegraph Morning

Albert has made a novel that approaches depression and maternal anxiety with candid honesty, transforming writing on motherhood forever

—— Aaron Calvin , AskMen UK

A hilarious, honest, and eye-opening book, this is a must have for any new mum or mum-to-be

—— Mummy Pages

Funny and heartfelt

—— i (The paper for today)

Ms. Moran['s] ... funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.

—— Dwight Garner , New York Times

there’s so much real feeling too. Johanna’s vulnerability and bravado, as she moves out of her world and falls in love is beautifully done’ or ‘ and running through it all, with a visceral power that most writers should envy, is the shame and grinding anxiety of being poor

—— Sunday Times

Moran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious

—— The Independent on Sunday

an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable…Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to Nightingales…

—— Barbara Ellen , The Observer

rude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel…so filthy she’ll make you blush

—— Christina Patterson , The Sunday Times

This is going to be a bestseller…A sharp, hilarious and controversial read

—— The Bookseller

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

—— Alice Thompson , Herald

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

—— NPR

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

—— Atlantic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

—— Washington Post

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

—— Susan McCallum , LA Review of Books

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

—— Kenneth Miller , Everyday Ebook

A unique conversation between past and present

—— Milwaukee Journal

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh

—— Bustle Magazine
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