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What it means to be good �� or not �� is the infected wound at the center of Aria Aber’s debut novel, “Good Girl.�� The narrator is a forlorn young woman named Nila Haddadi, and the story she tells sounds like a howl of despair transposed into the key of poetic retrospection. Indeed, the fact that this harrowing story recalls events from more than a decade ago provides the only reassurance that the narrator survived her teens.

Nila’s Afghan mother gave birth to her in Berlin during a burst of international optimism when the wall fell. But her neighborhood had already become a canker of xenophobia in the reunified city. “I was born inside its ghetto-heart,�� Nila says, “as a small, wide-eyed rat.�� She quickly develops a sense of herself as a mote buffeted about by disastrous geopolitics �� particularly Russian and American hubris in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires.��

“Good Girl�� is never overtly political, but the fabric of this story constantly catches on the barbed wire of Europe’s isolationism. Though set several years ago, the inhospitable culture that Aber describes anticipates the success this past fall of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing party advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants. And of course, such animus powers the incoming U.S. administration, too. Just last month, Trump trumpeter Elon Musk told his 210 million followers on X, “Only the AfD can save Germany.�� American readers willing to hear the mingled frustration and despondency of an alienated generation will find in “Good Girl�� a heartbreaking lament.

Aber’s writing thrums with the knowledge of lived experience: Like her protagonist, she was born in Germany, and her parents were also immigrants from Afghanistan. The neo-Nazi acts of intimidation and terror that she includes in “Good Girl�� are, sadly, elements of recent history, not fiction....

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