The pain of living

The title of Greg Baxter's novel, Munich Airport (Twelve, $25), is also the setting for this novel-of-memory, concerned mostly with the pain of living. The unnamed narrator and his father are waiting in the Munich Airport for the weather to clear so that they can accompany the body of Miriam, the narrator's sister, back to the United States. Miriam's corpse was found in her Munich apartment, where she had starved herself to death. Her father and brother are struggling to come to terms with this form of suicide, searching unsuccessfully through what they know of her life to find a reason, but the narrator is also searching for a way to cope with pain that he has difficulty expressing. Very much a novel of the internal, Munich Airport is also a story about estrangement, whether emotional or geographic.