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&rsquo;t get out.<

&ldquo;A no-bullsht, must-read debut.&rdquo;&mdash;Kaveh Akbar
*&ldquo;Kaleidoscopic . . . full of style and soul.&rdquo;&mdash;Raven Leilani
&ldquo;Radiant with longing and beauty.&rdquo;&mdash;Sarah Thankham Matthews
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In Berlin&rsquo;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.&#160;
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Then in the haze of Berlin&rsquo;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&rsquo;s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany&mdash;and Nila&rsquo;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?
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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.

Autorentext

Aria Aber

Klappentext

*“An exhilarating debut novel” (R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review*) about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of 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-bullsht, must-read debut.”—Kaveh Akbar
“Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul.”—Raven Leilani
“Aber writes with . . . masterful precision.”—Leila Lalami, The Atlantic***

"Once in a blue moon a debut novel comes along, announcing a voice quite unlike any other, with a layered story and sentences that crackle and pop, begging to be read aloud. Aria Aber’s splendid Good Girl introduces just such a voice . . . Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold here, much like Kaveh Akbar did in last year’s acclaimed Martyr!"—Los Angeles Times

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

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.

Leseprobe
One

The train back to Berlin took seven hours, and the towel in my suitcase was still wet from my last swim in the lake, dampening the pages of my favorite books. I took the S-­Bahn and then the U-Bahn home to Lipschitzallee and walked past the discount supermarket, the old pharmacy, and the Qurbani Bakery with the orange shop cat lounging outside its door. In our building’s elevator, an intimate odor assaulted my nostrils: urine mixed with ash. Hello, spider, I said, looking at the cobweb in the corner. The ceiling lamp twitched, turning alien the swastika graffiti. My key, fastened by a pink ribbon, turned in the old lock. Nobody was home. I kicked off my shoes. The cat meowed for food, its dander floating in the air. My room was merely all it had been for so many years: a suffocating box with a tiny window, pink sheets, and that Goethe quote I’d painted in golden letters above my desk. The popcorn ceiling seemed lower than before. I wiped the kitchen counters, walked into my parents’ bedroom, opened their closet, and pulled out my mother’s cashmere frock. Maybe I cried, maybe I didn’t. What I did was lie in bed and sleep until dark, covering my face with her dress.

It’s been over a decade now, but the colors of that summer day are as precise as yesterday: I was eighteen when I returned from boarding school, and my sense of melancholy was even more overwhelming than I anticipated. My cousins called me pretentious. The Arab boys who loitered outside the shisha bar sneered at me. You changed, they said, meaning my relative lack of vernacular and my newfound obsession with eyeliner.

Back then, I still wanted to be a photographer, a small Olympus point-­and-­shoot knocking around in my backpack. In my first days back, Berlin bloomed at the seams with rotten garbage. Ants crawled out of the sockets in my father’s living room, a small street of them always leading up the wall and out the window; no matter how much poison we sprayed into the electrical outlets or taped them shut—­they just returned. And though prophesied to soon be extinct, the bees were also everywhere. They covered the overflowing trash cans in the city, or you’d see them lazily dozing on outdoor café tables, where they fattened themselves on crumbs of sugar or lay unconscious next to jars of cherry jam. I brushed the dirt out of my hair and rinsed it from my face and all I could hear, even in the early morning, was the howling of sirens over the frenzied songs of birds, which chirped and chirped and chirped.

In August, I enrolled at Humboldt Universität for philosophy and art history, not because I wanted to study but because I wanted the free U-­Bahn pass. And so I let the glittery, destructive underworld of Berlin sink its fangs into me, my solitude alleviated only when I went out at night and got lost in some apartment with tattooed men and women who did poppers underneath a framed picture of Ulrike Meinhof. Then I went home, my nose bleeding, my hair smelling of cigarette smoke, and was confronted by that disappointed look on my father’s face, my grandmother’s suspended in a perpetual frown. I had been lifted out of the low-­income district of hopelessness and sent to one of the best schools in the country, and yet here I was, my mother was dead, soon the city would be covered in snow again, and I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.

Autumn was short and humid, and then, overnight, it was winter. On the news, I saw middle-­aged men with pearlescent smiles and young blond TV anchors in starched suits reporting about the financial crisis, the lack of jobs, the jammed Eurotunnel, snow collecting on the spires of basilicas in Northern Italy, and somewhere, everywhere, a missing girl, or an Ara…