For Nila, the narrator of award-winning poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, Berlin’s party scene is an escape route from the city’s menacing streets and her own family’s haunting history. But Nila knows she’s just entering another kind of hunting ground. Amid the bald men handing girls pills, the pounding bass, flashing lights and fake friends, Marlowe Woods stalks his prey. A once-famous literary darling on the decline, he has a way with words, a taste for youth and teeth that might draw blood.

Beauty, to Nila, is ‘a tragic virtue often abused’, but she has something darker – something ‘like a fraught hunger for life, like a voice that said I would do anything’. So she follows him first into the bathroom and then into his life. Soon, she’s ‘hostage to his realizations’ as well as his bad decisions, mistaking violence for beauty until she begins to trust her own senses. Then, she picks up a camera and sees in her own self-portrait the ‘uncanny tragedy in the black disc of her eyes’.

Good Girl is an expertly crafted, sprawling work, its prose alternately icily precise and drenched in emotion. The novel is as likely to slip into a satire of rich dilettantes hosting a charity gala as it is to dip into a meditation on politics; this is a bildungsroman for party