Magic Classical Book Club: "Good Girl" by Aria Aber

Today’s guest on the Magic Classical Book Club is Aria Aber who will be talking about her new novel: 'Good Girl'

A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can't escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery

In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.

Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani.

And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.

Tim firstly asked how it feels to have the Indie Book of the Month:

"Thank you so much. I feel quite honoured. I love indie bookstores and it's just a big joy to share my book with readers that way."

Tim followed up by asking her favourite independent bookshop:

"Yes, Phoenix Books here in Vermont. I like it a lot. It's quite cozy and you can browse for hours in indie bookstores. And I also remember really liking Brick Lane books, when I used to live in London, because my apartment was close."

Tim then asked her what drew her to explore the tension through fiction rather than memoir or poetry of this interesting story:

"It's a made up story. So, I didn't grow up in Berlin, however, I was always quite interested in the city of Berlin.

_"I lived there for, two years and it's just an amazing place that has been pockmarked by history in the most extreme ways. Of course, it was kind of formed by this First World War, by the Second World War, and then by the Cold War, I guess it was like a literal wall dividing the city into two."_

"However, there is always that dark underside, and I thought it would be quite interesting to invent or write a character who embodies a very modern and contemporary version of Berlin, where she has a kind of a migration story in her family and is grappling with German identity."

Tim then asks about the relationships in the story, specifically Milo:

"Yes. So Milo is this older American writer. He's an expat. He is on one hand, diametrically opposed to Nila in the sense that he's a white man who has come to Berlin voluntarily rather than having been born in Berlin. He lives as an artist. At least that's what it seems like in the beginning. And she idolizes him. There is like a glamorous sheen to him.

He's well known in the circles that she frequents, he has a little bit of fame and some money. And, she really looks up to him. She starts dating him and their relationship becomes quite tumultuous, manipulative. Maybe even borders on the abusive, but their stories within the novel, like their arcs are also a little bit opposed in the sense that as Nila is finding herself and becoming more confident in her own artistic vision and in her voice and her identity and so on, but he's kind of crumbling and losing power over her, but also over his own life. So I was interested in Milo for a variety of reasons. I think on the one hand it's fun to have like a kind of villain-esque figure in the novel, but on the other hand, there are also plenty of men like him that I've encountered in my life."

Tim finally asked Aria for her favourite piece of classical music and why she chose it:

"I've chosen Johann Sebastian Bach, his Cello Suite in G minor.

Cello is just one of my favourite instruments and I am very moved by that piece all the time, even though it's quite melancholy, it uplifts me as well."

If you want to listen back to Tim's interview with Aria Aber, click here to see all of Tim's past shows.