The Kafka-esque struggle of an Afghan German girl is all too timely

Book Review Good Girl By Aria Aber Hogarth: 368 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Aria Aber’s splendid “Good Girl” introduces just such a voice, chronicling a young Afghan German woman’s misadventures among Berlin’s night clubs and drug dens as she plunges into a volatile romance with an expatriate American writer. The book’s not without wobbles, but Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold here, much like Kaveh Akbar did in last year’s acclaimed “Martyr!” Aber’s narrator, Nila, now on the cusp of 30, looks back a decade at her 19-year-old self, when she drifted into the orbit of Marlowe, a 36-year-old Californian who’d published a celebrated novel in his youth but hadn’t followed up, wallowing instead in liquor and ecstasy, hopping from bed to bed. Nila’s fear of abandonment drives “Good Girl”; her emotions pinwheel across the pages. “Good Girl,” then, is a bildungsroman, gorgeously packed with Nila’s epiphanies on literature and philosophy, a tale of seductive risks and the burdens of diaspora.