Stefan Kiesbye - Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

If I should leave Hemmersmoor once again, I won’t need to burn down my house. Alex has offered to buy it, and he’ll get rid of my belongings faster than any fire could. He plans to open a small boutique, maybe an antiques store. With his help, I will take all my memories with me; I will be less than a ghost. Should anybody ask about my whereabouts, Martin, Linde, and Alex will shrug helplessly and shake their heads. I can count on my old friends. Christian Bobinski, the pale boy? Never heard of him.

“Full of dark folk magic and frightful, lurid wonder. It casts a spell, winking all the way through every grim detail and shadowy secret.”

“Creepy in a way that actually made me quite nervous.”

“A brilliant amalgam of Faulkner, the Brothers Grimm, and Günter Grass as if condensed for intensity.”

“The characters are all doomed. ‘Doomed to what?’ is the only question, and you won’t put the book down until you find out.”

“[A novel] with a chilling twist here and there, a sly, stark wit, and a fascinating cast of lost boys and girls.”

“Stefan Kiesbye would be a writer to watch out for if he had not so clearly already arrived.”

STEFAN KIESBYE has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin’s Freie Universität. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, New Mexico, where he teaches creative writing at Eastern New Mexico University. He is also the arts editor of Absinthe: New European Writing. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl , won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and was praised by Peter Ho Davies as “utterly gripping,” by Charles Baxter as “both laconic and feverish,” and by Robert Olmstead as “maddeningly powerful.”

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Penguin Books 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Stefan Kiesbye, 2012

All rights reserved

Pages 21–30 appeared in different form under the title “Rico’s Journey Through Hell” in Hobart in 2007.

Pages 93–103 appeared in different form under the title “The Mill” in Fickle Muses in 2007.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kiesbye, Stefan.

Your house is on fire, your children all gone : a novel / Stefan Kiesbye.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60363-5

1. Older people—Fiction. 2. Early memories—Fiction. 3. Villages—Fiction. 4. Germany—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.I4464Y68 2012

813’.6—dc22 2012023841

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond

Designed by Elke Sigal

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