"Nila was brought up to believe she had to be “a dokhtare khub, a good girl, in order not to turn into a dokhtare kharab, a broken, bad, ruined, girl.� But at 18, starting college while still reeling from her mother’s recent death, Nila questioned everything about herself: her needs, her wants, and above all her cultural heritage. Her Afghan-German family live in Berlin, for Nila that translated into a flat in a run-down Lipschitzallee high-rise, an area routinely associated with deprivation and the socially marginal. Nila’s liberal, activist parents fled Afghanistan before she was born, hoping to live more freely in Germany. But events like the infamous Rostock riots, that took place when Nila was still learning to walk, soon made it clear this new country presented new and menacing challenges.

Aria Aber’s vivid, visceral, semi-autobiographical novel centres on Nila, a decade later, reflecting on her 18-year self and the choices she made. Choices she now recognises as rooted in grief and self-loathing. Nila’s depiction of herself resembles the protagonists found in contemporary “sad girl lit�. But unlike those � almost always - white girls mired in generalised, existential crises, Nila’s confusion is rooted in conflicted feelings about her identity and struggles with an everyday racism so pervasive it’s become internalised. Aber’s narrative zooms in on Nila’s day-to-day: drugs, clubs, and an increasingly-abusive relationship with older, washed-up American writer Marlowe. But, throughout, Aber traces connections between Nila’s personal dilemmas, her self-destructive brand of double consciousness, and Germany’s broader political climate.

Aber’s Germany’s fractured, fragmented, rife with social inequality. A space peopled by clashing subcultures from Nila’s hedonistic friends to the countercultural groups who flock to the Fusion Festival, to the neo-Nazis and terrorists like the National Socialist Underground � whose racist killing sprees were largely unacknowledged as such for years. Aber’s Berlin is a claustrophobic place whose architecture conveys its chequered past � buildings and their layout have a profound impact on Nila’s state of mind.

As you might expect from someone who’s primarily a poet, Aber’s writing is well-crafted, her scenes richly imagined and keenly observed. Nila’s obsession with literature and photography that’s exclusively embedded in white, Western canonical traditions is a particularly interesting means of conveying Nila’s internal conflict, her position as someone who’s always just outside the frame - even when she features in her own and in Marlowe’s “art� she’s more object than subject. It’s a striking piece, filled with arresting images and numerous excellent scenes and passages. But, like so many debut novels, it’s overpacked, sometimes points are hammered home so repetitively they lose their force. It has a languid intensity I frequently found disarming but sometimes it was just too languid even for me � it could easily withstand extensive trimming. But, for readers who can overlook its flaws I think it’s more than worth investing the time.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Bloomsbury Circus for an ARC

Rating: 3.5"

""a portrait of the artist as a young woman" <3

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)"

"Now Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025
At first, Aber's apparently autofictional debut seems to be a tale as old as time: Hedonistic Berlin party girl takes too much speed at legendary techno club , sleeps with toxic bois and seeks meaning, the end. If German literature is your home turf, this storyline is so overdone, it only works as parody - but Aber gives it a twist that keeps up the intrigue: Her narrator, 19-year-old Nila, was born to Afghan parents, and she drifts through to the once divided city shortly after 9/11, in deep grief after losing her mother. In an environment still unsettled by post-unification right-wing violence (in Germany called the baseball bar years) and the terror brought about by what we now know as the , she feels pressured by her father's expectations to be the title-giving good Afghan girl, carrying the weight of her parents' destiny as refugees - former doctors, they now hardly get by in the infamous brutalist skyscrapers of (btw also where Christiane V. Felscherinow grew up).

Nila flees into Berlin nightlife (okay, that's really a cliche) and starts a relationship with a toxic boi (sure), but how Aber renders this dynamic is great. From the start, older American writer Marlowe aims to dominate Nila, and the naive young woman falls for his manipulative antics, but there also seems to be a wish inside the grieving daughter to be physically hurt, to be punished and demeaned for what is perceived as her flaws - perceived by the world, perceived by herself. And that's where the text is psychologically interesting: Nila battles all these issues, and she seeks relief in forms of self-destruction she believes she deserves. Her dream is to become an artist though, and Aber encourages readers to root for this volatile narrator who, as we know, deserves much better.

Sure, there are too many repetitive party scenes, and Aber's perspective is also slightly off, as we are supposed to believe that the story is told by an older Nila looking back - if that's the case, there are layers of reflection lacking, the disconnect between youthful naivete and later wisdom is not played out accordingly. Still, Nila's complexity is so fascinating, the contradictory impulses are shown so convincingly, that this debut is just a pleasure to read."

"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....

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
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