Aria Aber’s ‘Good Girl’ is about a fractured search for self

Good girls don’t. But Nila does. She takes drugs, lies to her parents, drops out of university, and disappears into Berlin’s underground club scene.

Her actions seem rebellious on the surface, but underneath lies a deeper, more complex struggle — with shame, identity, and the weight of inheritance.

Aria Aber’s debut novel, ‘Good Girl’, is a raw, lyrical and emotionally-charged exploration of a young woman caught between worlds, searching for her own voice in the ruins of cultural expectation and personal trauma.

Nila, a 19-year-old aspiring artist, is the German-born daughter of Afghan refugees. Raised in public housing marked by xenophobia and displacement, she has grown up suspended between identities — never quite at home in Germany, and estranged from the traditions and expectations of her family’s homeland. Her father calls her shameless, but she is, in truth, overwhelmed by shame: for her background, her body, her desires, and her need for something more than survival.

Aber sets the novel in Berlin, a city that functions not just as a backdrop but as a living, breathing force. Its history — layered with trauma, reinvention, and subversion — mirrors Nila’s own internal conflict. Berlin’s techno clubs and crumbling warehouses become spaces of refuge and reinvention, allowing Nila to step outside the boundaries of who she is expected to be.

The city is described with poetic texture, rendering it almost tactile in its immediacy and contradictions.

It’s in this urban chaos that Nila finds her tribe: artists, misfits, and other young people drawn to music, photography, and the freedom of nocturnal anonymity. She doesn’t speak easily, but she tells her truth through images. Photography becomes her language, her means of processing what she can’t articulate — the inheritance of exile, the pain of silence, and the act of seeing herself clearly for the first time.

A central and unsettling relationship in the novel is between Nila and Marlowe, a much older American writer who claims to admire her voice but ultimately reflects the imbalances of power, race, and desire. Through this dynamic, Aber interrogates the boundaries between mentorship and manipulation, fascination and fetishisation, authenticity and appropriation.

Aber is best known as a poet and the book, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, is infused with poetic clarity and emotional precision.

She doesn’t aim for tidy resolutions; instead, Aber elaborates on what it costs to find one’s voice in a world that often demands silence or conformity. She explores the contradictions of femininity, the fragile line between rebellion and self-destruction.

Aber offers a fractured, powerful portrait of what it means to be a “good girl” — culturally, sexually, socially — and what it takes to break free from that mould. ‘Good Girl’ isn’t a feel-good, coming-of-age story. Provocative yet empathic, it is something braver — an honest, fractured search for self.

— The reviewer is a freelance contributor