Good Girl

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025
A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can't escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery
'Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul' Raven Leilani
'A must-read ... Dark, breathtaking, profound, so fresh' Guardian
'A no-bullshit must-read debut' Kaveh Akbar
'Delicious, propulsive reading' Vogue


In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.
Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani.
And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.
'Rarely has the wildness and bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat' Garth Greenwell

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her debut poetry collection Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2020 Whiting Award, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker and New Republic. She holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Good Girl is her first novel.