Good Girl

De: Aria Aber

Narrado por: Mozhan Navabi

Bloomsbury presents Good Girl by Aria Aber, read by Mozhan Navabi

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

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

©2025 Aria Aber (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Reseñas de la Crítica

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)

Aria Aber's Berlin roils, seethes and shimmers with complexity. She captures the dark history that lingers in the concrete, amid the joy and terror of youth. In sticky, electric prose, she explores family, race, reinvention, oblivion and the necessity of facing hard truths in order to own yourself, before you are swallowed by the limits the world places on you (Jessica Andrews)

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 ... I’m 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)