Next Door Lived A Girl

by Stefan Kiesbye

Book Overview

Fiction. Winner of the Low Fidelity press inaugural Novella Award, NEXT DOOR LIVED A GIRL is set in Wedersen, a working-class town in post-World War II Germany. It explores the dark transformation of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0991395298
• ISBN13: 9780991395293
• Release Date: July 2015
• Publisher: Saddle Road Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Next Door Lived a Girl

Next Door Lived a Girl is an intelligent, provocative story about a group of young boys and their exploits in Germany. It had real, in-depth characters, who are put into extraordinary, and complicated situations. Kiesbye's telling of the story is intriguing and very entertaining. I would recommend this book very highly.

Dark Intimacies Conveyed With Deft Perceptions

The writing in Stefan Kiesbye's perfectly pitched novella (its actually a short novel at 110 pages) is at once stark yet filled with wonderfully cast images and a story which draws the reader in from the first page. 'We are the Badgers. My name is Moritz. Thomas and I are the oldest. Johannes is the only boy whose father does not work at the candy factory. His family lives on the property of the slaughterhouse.' It is an oversimplification to say the story in NEXT DOOR LIVED A GIRL is one of incest and violence. There is ever so much more to this book; the narrative voice filled with compassion and care for even its bleakest characters. Set in working class Germany, the book is at once intimate to its time and landscape and transcendent of such, like a great fable. In my capacity as a writer and reviewer, my work is often complicated in that I can't help meeting and getting to know many other writers. I come clean then here and say that I have recently gotten to know Stefan Kiesbye. Those who know me, however, understand that I would never write a review for a friend if I did not truly find his work worthy. There is no question of this with Stefan's wonderful achievement in NEXT DOOR LIVED A GIRL.

Kiesbye's book is lithe and sharp

Stefan is my friend. That is fair to say up front. He and I have studied together, fought with each other and been good friends for a number of years. But that should in no way diminish the validity of this claim: I believe this novella is one of the finest pieces written in recent years. An old hand at writing (Stephen King, no less) has said that a basic definition of art is that it gives back more than you give it. This is a useful definition in many ways, and Stefan's book is proof of the claim. 110 pages of terse, startling prose yields returns on par with equisitely rendered poetry. It is a stark landscape, not unlike the tightly wound world of Hitchcock's Psycho, and it will pay you back many times over for each moment you pay it by lingering with its words.