Memoir of combat veteran to Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury is to publish Eat the Apple, the memoir of combat veteran Matt Young.

Anton Mueller, executive editor at Bloomsbury, acquired world English rights to Eat the Apple from Chris Clemans at The Clegg Agency.

Eat the Apple is the memoir of Young, a marine who was deployed to Iraq and re-deployed twice again. It begins the day he enlisted at the age of 18 after drunkenly crashing his car into a fire hydrant.

It uses "a kaleidoscopic array of immersive narrative angles" to tell the story of his three hard tours in Iraq during the surge and IED (improvised explosive device) road wars, "dropping the reader unarmed into the heart of Marine Corps culture and laying bare the tragicomic absurdism of war in the 21st century, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true if often misguided motivations that drove a young man to a life in the military".

Mueller said: “Deft in its emotional, psychological and intellectual complexity, Eat the Apple is a powerful testament to war’s tragic futility and an indictment of our current foreign engagement. It is brilliantly, daringly written. The energy on the page is a thing of beauty. There are passages here you will want to dwell on. They are poetry. Throughout, Matt Young also uses shifts in point of view that split the narrative consciousness in ways that enable a stunning richness of experience, loads of humor, and a kind of alienated pathos that makes us really care for him.”

Clemans said: “From the opening pages I knew I was in the presence of a thrilling and original voice. Matt is omnivorous in his approach, taking always the narrative tack that will get him and the reader closest to the truth, something that Elliot Ackerman more eloquently dubs his ‘stylistic and structural swagger.’ In Eat the Apple, he writes with fearless candor and irreverence about the backstage culture of war, the collective grunt soul, and the private flaws and delusions that led him to become one of the few and the proud.”

Eat the Apple will be published globally in 2017 in hardcover and e-book across all Bloomsbury territories.