Published by Hogarth
Jan 14, 2025 | ISBN 9780593731116
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.
PRAISE
"Aria Aber’s stunning Good Girl is a novel of longing and tenderness, a piercing Künstlerroman that understands home as a heartbeat and a heartache, writing into the ache and daily metronome of exile. It’s a love song and a torch song for Berlin—like an ode to a body full of chronic pain, this is me and it also hurts me. I disappeared into the many overlapping and colliding worlds of this book and emerged with a glistening, vibrating, beautifully exhausted heart—newly alive to the complexities of love and family and becoming ourselves. I loved this book." —Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters
“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 Farheen Mirza, New York Times bestselling author of A Place for Us
“In Good Girl, pleasure is textured, surprising, and treated with utter seriousness. Aber’s prose is kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul.”––Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of LUSTER
“Aria Aber’s Good Girl dives heartfirst into one of the art’s great crises: that the great searing ecstasies of youth should form us before we have the psychospiritual maturity to articulate them. Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drip’s still a numbing bitter in your throat. Aber’s ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice she’s building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics. Seldom has the scald of shame felt so vivid, so lode-bearing, so eviscerating. Good Girl is a no-bullshit must-read debut.”––Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of MARTYR!
“Aria Aber’s debut is a novel to be transported and moved by, full as it is of many charms, from its jeweled prose to its evocations of history-haunted Berlin to its portrait of a young Muslim artist finding her way. Good Girl is radiant with longing, eroticism, and beauty.”—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different, finalist for the National Book Award
“Aria Aber’s Good Girl is a haunting exploration of identity and desire. Nila’s journey through historic and scintillating Berlin, marked by profound loneliness and a relentless pursuit of self-discovery, makes this novel both compelling and unforgettable. The book’s poignant reflection on the urban experience is a testament to Aber’s immense storytelling talent, ensuring Good Girl remains as remarkable and timeless as the very nature of fiction itself.”—Morgan Talty, national bestselling author of Fire Exit