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✨“But of course there could be no holy place on earth; our life here was purgatorial and meaningless, and God had forgotten about us.��

At the heart of this novel is grief. Grief and shame, and a desperate need to outrun both of those things. The result is a gritty and glittery smashup of a book, yanking the reader through the pages, as if grabbing onto their hand and tugging them through a crowded club along with the narrator.

It’s a coming-of-age novel about Nila, a young Afghan woman, living in Berlin and existing in the dark underbelly of the club-scene. When she meets a much older man, an American writer named Marlowe, she assess (out loud, to him) that he is going to change her life.

In many ways he does, though in that way where, when you are young and trust the wrong people, that pain can calcify in you, inspiring you to create and seek out the parts of yourself which supersede the pain.

It’s a book about seeking and hiding, loving and losing, and it’s the rawest thing I’ve read, recently.

I’m blown away by this one, truly.