Nila is nineteen, fizzing with hormones and the desire for an artistic life. She seeks sex, highs, beauty, and most of all, liberty. But as the daughter of Afghan refugees, Nila’s childhood has been marred by discrimination, poverty, and cultural expectation. In a hypnotic debut novel longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, Good Girl by Aria Aber recounts a pivotal year in Nila’s life, as feeling othered and misunderstood, she searches for self and freedom amongst the famously hedonistic denizens of the Berlin art scene.
The story opens with Nila returning home after several years at boarding school. Her mother is dead and her old bedroom set in aspic, the same suffocating prison it always was. But Nila herself is not the same, the years away have changed her. As she navigates her familiar down-at-heel council block, which is still adorned with graffiti and stale urine, the local boys sneer at what they perceive as her snootiness. Her own family think she’s pretentious, but Nila knows she is destined for the world of art and literature.
The question is, how can a girl known as ‘alien blood’ at school, the daughter of impoverished asylum seekers, ever fulfil that wish? Feeling her heritage to be a shameful burden, Nila consistently obscures it, and against a backdrop of rising racial hostilities in Germany, begins her quest by letting the ‘glittery, destructive underworld of Berlin sink its fangs into me’.
In interviews, Aber has described her novel as being, in some ways, a love letter to Berlin. She brilliantly captures the city’s energy, the ghosts of the GDR years lingering in the high-rise estates, ‘sirens, cafés filled with stern faces, kebab shops, Spätis, and between them, everywhere, there was a Mohammed or an Ali or an Aisha trying to get by.’
But this is not the Berlin that Nila wants. The pulsating thrill of the techno clubs calls to her, a place where she can forget about upholding her Afghan family honour, and just lose herself in music, drugs and partying. Amphetamines are the main order of the day (and night) in dark, sweat-drenched clubs, inspired by infamous real-life venues.
It’s in one of these thrillingly debauched establishments that Nila meets Marlowe; a thirty-something, handsome American writer. Generous with drugs and sexual attention, he’s prone to grandiose philosophising and such utterances as ‘The party is what I live for’. Nila is, of course, smitten with this sophisticated older man, and launches into her first proper love affair, a full-throttle experience that initially masks her lingering unease. She has lied to Marlowe, telling him that she’s of Greek extraction, afraid of his pity, or something worse in this time of rising Islamophobia. Nila is also aware that if she continues with her current lifestyle choices, her childhood community will consider her to be a ‘dokhtare kharab, a broken, bad, ruined girl’. Indulgence and shame compete for her attention, as Nila keeps on partying.
Aber’s unique coming-of-age story of identity, culture, and fierce desire makes for a vivid and absorbing read. It deserves the judges’ attention this literary awards season. A writer to keep on your radar.
Good Girl by Aria Aber is by published by Bloomsbury, 368 pages.
