Good Girl

by Aria Aber

Afghan German. Berlin clubs. She told them she was Greek.

For you if

you have ever told someone a different answer to the question "where are you really from" and need a book that understands exactly why

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Aber was born and raised in Germany to Afghan parents who fled Kabul before she was born, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, writing in her third language. Nila — nineteen, a poet-in-formation — navigates Berlin's legendary techno clubs, an ill-advised love affair with an older American writer whose literary celebrity opens doors, and the specific exhaustion of being asked where she's really from in a country that considers itself her home. Aber uses the passing plot — Nila tells people she's Greek — to excavate the intergenerational weight of displacement: the specific shame of being Afghan in post-9/11 Europe, the neo-Nazi attacks on her community, the gap between the freedom Berlin's nightlife promises and the freedom it actually delivers to a girl from Gropiusstadt. Writing with a poet's precision in her third language, Aber produces sentences that crack and pop and demand to be read aloud. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Whiting Award winner.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Afghanistan • Central Asia
Voice: Written by a Afghan author
Themes: coming of age immigrant identity
Topics: afghan diaspora

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