Set in Wedersen, a working-class town in post-World War II Germany, Next Door Lived a Girl explores the dark transformation of young boys into young men. The town's veneer of peaceful industry barely conceals the ugly secrets that lie beneath. Moritz and his friends make a dangerous discovery that pulls them into a war with a rival gang, into the ruthless and cunning world of blackmail and consequence, and, ultimately, into a cascading series of events that will change the nature of their friendship, and their lives, forever.
"This is Stefan Kiesbye's brilliant debut, a book so quiet and yet so
maddeningly powerful, you just have to wonder about him a little
bit. The setting is tribal, alien, hostile and middle-class. The
backdrop is the lingering and haunting ravages of war, a place
where society does not hold together, does not transmit ideals and
values, does not sustain notions of right and wrong. Inescapable is
the rendering of a human condition: ordered, spontaneous and
shockingly violent.
"In clear and lucid prose, Next Door Lived A Girl reads as the
truest of true-crime novels. Its protagonist is the remembering
everyboy who suffers profoundly and in turn commits the gravest
of acts. His is a telling voice, agile, insightful and darkly humorous.
He does not ask for understanding because he knows you could not
possibly understand what happens and he does not ask for
forgiveness because he knows you could never forgive such terrible
actions.
"But you do understand these events. You understand them the
same way you understand falling water or tumbling stones. They
happen and you can do no other than believe them. And at the
extreme reach of your heart's mind you do forgive, because, well,
what else can you do? This he earns from you and what he earns,
he earns the hard way.
"You will read from beginning to end and you will feel this world and its inhabitants neither responding nor reacting in ways you quite expect, but nevertheless, rising up beneath you in a most compelling and unsettling way and when you are through you will scratch your head and tell someone they have to read it too."
- Robert Olmstead, 2004 Novella Award judge
"Next Door Lived a Girl is both laconic and
feverish, with German adolescent boys poking their
sometimes violent way into the world. The violence
here is somehow both surprising and inevitable.
The novella has a fascinating combination of
everyday domestic life and subsurface violence,
and Stefan Kiesbye is to be praised for this quietly
eloquent tale, this mixture of the horrifying and the
everyday."
- Charles Baxter
“Kiesbye's dark, distinctive vision of humanity, is
composed with such narrative skill and verve as
to render the bleakness bracing, the grimness
utterly gripping."
- Peter Ho Davies
"This brief, fierce book evokes a world where everything
is present tense and everyone at risk. Stefan Kiesbye
invites us on a guided tour of something very close to Hell
and points out the landmarks with skill; Moritz, his protagonist,
is clear-eyed first to last."
- Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Vagabonds
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