This powerful debut plunges the reader into a raging battle between a young Afghan woman’s cultural identity and desire for freedom

Nila is the wild, rebellious daughter of Afghan doctors who fled their home before she was born and settled in a brutalist social housing block in Berlin. After 9/11, the family learned to lie (“To resent ourselves with precision”), to hide parts of themselves that seemed too much like “those people”; Muslims in a city where Nazis were alive and well. Then her mother died, and Nila began looking for a way out. Venturing out of her neighbourhood, she saw “people drinking mulled wine at Christmas markets, and between them, everywhere, there was a Mohammed or an Ali or an Aisha trying to get by”. And she hated them, “hated everyone who had the same fate as I did … I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.”

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, follows the grieving Nila as she comes of age in the nightclubs of Berlin. At The Bunker, Nila does ecstasy and falls into an unequal romance with a charismatic American author who dominates and desires her in just the way the damaged creature inside her craves. Marlowe Woods offers her an escape from the Afghan ideal of a “good girl”. He is also a tedious narcissist who pontificates about art, obliviously invites neo-Nazis into his house, and finds foreign cab drivers (some of whom are Nila’s uncles) too depressing to talk to. At the same time, he seems to give himself credit for Nila’s artistic awakening as a photographer: an awakening that is rooted in her otherness, in the yearning both to estrange herself from and depict her parents, to make them beautiful to Europeans. Nila loves literature and art because they make her “a person incomprehensible” to her parents, and yet photography gives her access to her mother’s “secret inner life, adrift in our strange city … an unknowable loss marking her eyes”.