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 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. Written with an uncommon starkness and poetry, Next Door Lived a Girl is destined to find its place in the canon of great novellas alongside the likes of Harrison, Hemingway, and Roth.

"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

"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

"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. A significant and powerful debut." Peter Ho Davies

Stefan Kiesbye was born on Northern Germany's Baltic coast. In 1985 he moved to West Berlin, since it offered a wall and morbid exclusivity. He studied drama, performed on stages in Hamburg and Berlin, and hosted a morning show for a Gay and Lesbian radio station. After enrolling in American Studies, he received a German Academic Exchange Service fellowship to study at SUNY at Buffalo, and graduated in 1998. Three years later he received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Stefan Kiesbye?s stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches writing at Eastern Michigan University and works as a freelance writer.