Good Girl

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

'Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul' Raven Leilani 'A no-bullshit must-read debut' Kaveh Akbar In Berlins 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 citys 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

Reviews

A novel of overwhelming and conflicted love - for persons, for histories, for artistic creation, for Berlin. Her poets eye makes a thermal map of emotional landscapes, lighting up passion, desire, desperate hope, and violence -- Garth Greenwell
In Good Girl, pleasure is textured, surprising, and treated with utter seriousness. Abers prose is kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul -- Raven Leilani
Aria Abers Good Girl dives heartfirst into one of the arts great crises: that the great searing ecstasies of youth should form us before we have the psychospiritual maturity to articulate them. Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drips still a numbing bitter in your throat. Abers ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice shes building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics. Seldom has the scald of shame felt so vivid, so load-bearing, so eviscerating. Good Girl is a no-bullsh*t must-read debut -- Kaveh Akbar
A haunting exploration of identity and desire. Nila's journey through historic and scintillating Berlin, marked by profound loneliness and a relentless pursuit of self-discovery, makes this novel both compelling and unforgettable. The book's poignant reflection on the urban experience is a testament to Aber's immense storytelling talent, ensuring Good Girl remains as remarkable and timeless as the very nature of fiction itself -- Morgan Talty
Aber captures the seedy underside of what it means to be a party girl. She explores the intergenerational sting of what it means to be a good girl culturally, sexually, and socially. Her masterful prose guides the reader down the back alleys of Berlin, inviting the reader into a world all of her own making -- Marlowe Granados
I disappeared into the many overlapping and colliding worlds of this book and emerged with a beautifully exhausted heart - newly alive to the complexities of love and family and becoming ourselves -- Leslie Jamison
Charts with more precision and poetry than any novel I know the heavy inheritance that children of immigrants carry. Stunning, suspenseful, boldly defiant, and masterfully crafted ... Im haunted by the painful truth at the centre of Good Girl: that the process of breaking free inevitably breaks the self -- Fatima Mirza
At once euphoric and despairing, philosophical and poetic, Good Girl is a heartbreaking song of youth and desire and violence and history and the unbearable solitude of displacement -- Jamil Jan Kochai
Praise for Aria Aber: She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year * Paris Review *
At turns scathing and tender, ironic and keening ... There is too much barbed beauty for my few sentences to contain, though Abers do - elegantly; dangerously -- Solmaz Sharif
I appreciate a book of poems where the speaker (and, by extension, the self) arent let off the hook by whatever other concerns the book is circling. But, even in that process, theres a real generosity and warmth extended, balancing not only accountability to the always shifting world but also forgiveness * GQ *
An origin story and the shattering of an origin story at once. It sets out with an impossible task: How does a voice fill the gap, the void, of life as a perpetual refugee * The Rumpus *
Prepare to be turned upside down as you listen in to this blazing intelligence that juggles languages and global conflict to erase boundaries and to question other erasures -- Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours
Revel in the rise of this searing, essential new voice .... Every word, every phrase crafted to incise, with its electric currents of images that make up the lives of refugee mothers, fathers, and daughters, and the inherent homesickness of language, wars. This debut seduces, critiques, mourns, ruptures, replenishesand not without humor and wit -- Sally Wen Mao

Author Bio

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.