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Good Girl
- A Novel
- Length: 10 hrs
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Publisher's Summary
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.
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.
What the critics say
“Aria Aber’s Good Girl is a novel of overwhelming and conflicted love—for persons, for histories, for artistic creation, for Berlin. Her poet’s eye makes a thermal map of emotional landscapes, lighting up passion, desire, desperate hope, and violence, and showing how difficult they can be to distinguish in the crucible of experience. Rarely has the wildness and bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat.”—Garth Greenwell, award-winning author of Cleanness
“Good Girl charts with more precision and poetry than any novel I know the heavy inheritance that children of immigrants carry. Stunning, suspenseful, boldly defiant, and masterfully crafted, I only put this novel down to marvel at its prose. Aria Aber’s debut novel achieves the impossible task of making whole a life split between expectation and self-fulfillment, somehow transmuting shame itself in the process. I’m haunted by the painful truth at the center of Good Girl: that the process of breaking free inevitably breaks the self.”—Fatima Mirza, New York Times bestselling author of A Place for Us