Good Girl

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

A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

“A no-bullsh*t, must-read debut.”—Kaveh Akbar
“Kaleidoscopic . . . full of style and soul.”—Raven Leilani
“Radiant with longing and beauty.”—Sarah Thankham Matthews
 
In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. 
 
Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?
 
A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Prize. She is a former Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Narrative, and POETRY. She will join the faculty of the University of Vermont in September, 2024.