
Here is a Berlin-based book that takes ideas of the German capital and presents a lucid, timely, necessary portrait of the city. Good Girl invites us to Berlin’s techno scene and the subterranean sites that nurse its development and celebration, amidst a city still processing its past and forever drawing new inhabitants under its spell.
The book is told through the perspective of Nila, a teenage daughter of Afghan refugees navigating the numerous threads of her identity and figuring out who she is in a place that won’t let her forget. Aber adds another dynamic layer to an already outstanding debut through Nila’s relationship with an American writer, Marlowe Woods, which further complicates her own understanding of her identity in the world, and her rich inner life shaped by literature, music and art.
Perhaps Good Girl’s most stunning characterisations are of the city itself: the rattling transport networks which hurtle the masses through Berlin, the landmarks that punctuate its landscapes, the intimacies and familiarities of its domestic spaces, and the sensorial illustrations of the sights, sounds, and smells throughout the book’s pages. A book that deserves to be among 2025’s standouts; a novel which ought to be read far and wide.
Good Girl, Aria Aber (Bloomsbury)
Price: £16.99/£11.89 Ebook. Info: here
words CHLOË EDWARDS