Stefan Kiesbye

The novels But I Don’t Know You, published by Saddle Road Press, and No Sound to Break, No Moment Clear, released by Brighthorse Books, are out now.

No Sound to Break, No Moment Clear: In this moving coming-of-age novel set in the 1980’s, award-winning author Stefan Kiesbye tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy and his older sister, who grow up in Michigan’s storied Upper Peninsula, in a town that has been left off the map. Once no more than a small outcropping of stone in the middle of Lake Superior, it now lives its second incarnation away from curious eyes, a lost island, a haunted place where fairy tales and creatures of legends can still exist.

In an atmosphere of neighborly distrust, jealousy, and neglect, the boy and his older sister, Katia, chart their own course without guidance, oversight, or protection. The progressive dissolution of their family makes them discover the ugly secrets at the foundation of their own lives in this forgotten place, where you don’t have to sleep to have nightmares.

No Sound to Break, No Moment Clear is a novel about what is lost, what is found, and the challenges that, for better or worse, make us who we are.

But I Don’t Know You: After twenty-five years in the United States, Cal, an immigrant, loses his home and all personal documents and keepsakes from his childhood to a wildfire. Shortly thereafter, his marriage breaks apart and leaves him without witness to the years spent in the New World. The novel follows Cal on his travels across the country as he tries to reconnect with lost loves, discarded friends, and estranged mentors. A meditation on belonging, identity, memory, and on the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we were and who we have become, by the award-winning author of Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone and The Staked Plains.