Good Girl

By (author) Aber, Aria
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A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can’t escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery
Description:

**Longlisted for the Women''s Prize for Fiction 2025**

A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can’t escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery

‘Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul’ Raven Leilani
‘A must-read … Dark, breathtaking, profound, so fresh’ Guardian
‘A no-bullshit must-read debut’ Kaveh Akbar
‘Delicious, propulsive reading’ Vogue


In Berlin’s underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.

Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani.

And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city’s cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.

''Rarely has the wildness and bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat'' Garth Greenwell

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A beautiful coming-of-age story about identity and self-discovery
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A must-read … Dark, breathtaking, profound, so fresh … Nila shines in her wildness, in her yearning for beauty and freedom
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The coming-of-age story you need to read this month ... Literally pulsates with the sounds of the Berlin nightclub scene ... Aria Aber is an author to watch.
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An astonishing and compelling book ... A revelation
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Aber touches the heart of a young woman struggling to find herself in the heat of clashing cultures ... You’ll be immediately arrested by the haunting beauty of her work and the way desire pushes against the seams of despair
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Impressive … At heart, the novel is about the allure of freedom and the estrangement from others that is the cost of both exile and artistic creation … Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist … Exile, migration, displacement: These will splinter even the most solid self. But out of the shards, it is possible to make art, as Nila finally realizes – and as Aber has done in this touching novel
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A vivid, energising, audacious journey through a dreamlike drug-steeped Berlin, GOOD GIRL is as full of can''t look away disasters, as of moments of beautiful humanity, and gorgeous, sumptuous sentences. Powerful, unexpected, and utterly absorbing. I flew through it
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Captures the ache of Muslim girlhood and the vertigo of never feeling quite at home ... Aber ingests the millennial playbook and spits out something that happens to be more interesting
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This book transported us into the