Matt Young holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships with Words After War and the Carey Institute for Global Good. He is a combat veteran, and lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches composition.

@young_em_see

'Matt Young has written the Iliad of the Iraq War ... This book will strengthen your heart and soul' Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged eighteen, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.

Eat the Apple is the response to those years. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the vulnerability of those on the front lines and the motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.

Inventive and unputdownable, Eat the Apple is a powerful coming-of-age story about the devastating consequences of war.

Raw and powerful . It's strictly categorised as a memoir, but Young attempts something much more formally daring . Remarkable

Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining

Uncompromising. Page after page slices close to the bone with both stylistic and structural swagger

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

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

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