ARIA ABER IM GESPRÄCH MIT MIRIAM DAVOUDVANDI (AKA CASHMIRI)

"Good Girl" by Aria Aber is an ecstatically booming paean to the lost intimacies of youth. A virtuoso debut novel and the harrowing portrait of a young artist who is swept up in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, violence, friendship breaking up, losing family and grief.

A young woman can gain access to almost anything. How she then gets out of it is another question.

In old cellar halls, where techno makes the walls shake, still scarred by the violence of the last century, 19-year-old Nila meets like-minded people. They lay down lines while preaching socialism, and for Nila, this dark mass body is the way out of the Berlin prefab building, where only refugees like her live, where the toilets are infested with silverfish and the walls are smeared with swastikas.

She only escapes the memory of her dead mother, once a great feminist revolutionary, now just a last flash in the eyes of her life-weary father, when she is intoxicated. For anyone who asks her, her family is Greek, not Afghan.

And then Nila meets the American writer Marlowe Woods, who opens up a world of patrons and festivals to her, who has always wanted to write. Marlowe shares generously, but counter-demands and demands soon follow that far exceed the limits of what Nila can bear.

"Good Girl" will be published by Claassen Verlag on February 27, 2025, 222 pages