Eat the Apple

Reviews / Votes

Raw and powerful ... It's strictly categorised as a memoir, but Young attempts something much more formally daring ... Remarkable * Observer * Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining * New York Times Book Review * Here he narrates with cold distance, there he is close and grisly. Some pages are tender and wistful, others repulsive, still others funny. The experimental, jagged account matches the disjointed life of the soldier ... In writing about war, [Young] has found a purpose and his voice * Economist * In his fever dream of a narrative, images shift in and out of focus, forming a collage of death, excitement, vulgarity, friendship, boredom and humour, which is war itself ... Eat the Apple is, essentially, a coming-of-age story, one about reckoning with the dissolution of youthful ideals, even when those ideals are as repugnant as a desire to kill another person to prove your own worth. Armies have always been populated by young men and women in search of this type of validation, but few have been able to write about it * Times Literary Supplement * Matt Young has written the Iliad of the Iraq war - searing as the desert sun, powerful as a rocket-propelled grenade ... This book will strengthen your heart and soul * Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award * Uncompromising. Page after page slices close to the bone with both stylistic and structural swagger * Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue * By turns hilarious and wrenching - and shot through with moments of piercing wisdom - Eat the Apple casts a kind of hypnotic spell that holds the reader until the last page ... Read this book * Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East * A standout ... Fresh, invigorating, and brutally honest in a scorched-earth kind of way. Eat the Apple scrapes the landscape of memory raw until it bleeds, and that's what puts it head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd * David Abrams, author of Fobbit *