Good Girl

Aber was born and raised in Germany to Afghan parents who fled Kabul before she was born, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, writing in her third language. Nila — nineteen, a poet-in-formation — navigates Berlin's legendary techno clubs, an ill-advised love affair with an older American writer whose literary celebrity opens doors, and the specific exhaustion of being asked where she's really from in a country that considers itself her home. Aber uses the passing plot — Nila tells people she's Greek — to excavate the intergenerational weight of displacement: the specific shame of being Afghan in post-9/11 Europe, the neo-Nazi attacks on her community, the gap between the freedom Berlin's nightlife promises and the freedom it actually delivers to a girl from Gropiusstadt. Writing with a poet's precision in her third language, Aber produces sentences that crack and pop and demand to be read aloud. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Whiting Award winner.