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.

About the Author :
Stefan Kiesbye was born on the Baltic Coast and later lived in Berlin, Germany. An award-winning novelist, he has been acclaimed as "the inventor of the modern German Gothic novel" (Die Welt), and his work has been called "absorbing and disconcerting" (Más Cultura) and "sublime" (BookPage). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Review :
"Stefan Kiesbye is expert at writing suspenseful novels full of creeping dread, and But I Don't Know You is his best yet. It's a novel for our time, chock full of disasters-medical, environmental, personal-with a riveting missing person plot at the heart of it, a plot that takes all of our apocalyptic swirling dread and focuses it on a single man who wants to know what has happened to his wife. The reader expects the worst, but hopes for the best, and no one is better at creating exactly this kind of tension-between doom and optimism, between the end of the world and the desire to still live in it-than Stefan Kiesbye. What a writer, what a book!" - Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? "An extraordinary portrait of a man full of desire and grief and unsated ambition who searches for himself in the towns of his past and discovers something more shadowy, more mysterious than memory. Stefan Kiesbye's But I Don't Know You is gorgeously honest and emotive, precise and perceptive." - Corinna Vallianatos, author of The Beforeland "Caught between identities inherited and invented, shape-shifting with the certitudes, abandoned to sudden riddance, the protagonist of Kiesbye's keen pandemic-wildfire noir traces an epic estrangement to the penultimate mystery. This 21st century quest for the vanished other makes cool headlong poetry out of intimate and existential smithereens. Bravo!" - Donald Morrill, author of Beaut