Good Girl: A Novel

"It perfectly captured this time in a woman’s life, or this woman’s life. She’s the daughter of an Afghan refugee in Berlin, and she’s ashamed of it. Anyone that has had shame in their lives, especially shame related to your identity, will really identify with this book. There’s a section in it where she really fancies this guy, a very unsuitable guy, and—as we all do—she is trying to be cool, trying to say the right thing, to sit right, eat right, smoke right. It has really unusual sentence structures—the way they start. It’s quite extraordinary, really. So well done. Nila is trying things out, trying to stabilise herself, trying to accommodate all the aspects of herself that fight against one another. It’s not easy to write about that time of life without becoming maudlin and it isn’t that, it has a lot of life in it."

"I’ve heard a lot of people raving about Good Girl by Aria Aber, in which 19-year-old Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents—attends raves, experiments with art, and grapples with her complicated cultural identity. “I knew that I wanted to write a character like her, who is first of all a wayward Afghan woman, and then someone who can shapeshift and code switch, who can go into different rooms and observe them,” Aber has explained . “I was interested in the innocence but also the slipperiness that youth allows you to inhabit, enact and perform, but that’s also often a little dangerous.” (Out now.)"