Recommendations from our site
“It perfectly captured this time in a woman’s life, or this woman’s life. She’s the daughter of an Afghan refugee in Berlin, and she’s ashamed of it. Anyone that has had shame in their lives, especially shame related to your identity, will really identify with this book. There’s a section in it where she really fancies this guy, a very unsuitable guy, and—as we all do—she is trying to be cool, trying to say the right thing, to sit right, eat right, smoke right. It has really unusual sentence structures—the way they start. It’s quite extraordinary, really. So well done.” Read more...
The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Kit de Waal, Novelist
“I’ve heard a lot of people raving about Good Girl by Aria Aber, in which 19-year-old Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents—attends raves, experiments with art, and grapples with her complicated cultural identity. “I knew that I wanted to write a character like her, who is first of all a wayward Afghan woman, and then someone who can shapeshift and code switch, who can go into different rooms and observe them,” Aber has explained. “I was interested in the innocence but also the slipperiness that youth allows you to inhabit, enact and perform, but that’s also often a little dangerous.”” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
