**Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025** 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 ' Kaleidoscopic
full of style and soul ' Raven Leilani 'A must-read . Dark breathtaking profound so fresh'
Guardian ' A no-bullshit must-read debut ' Kaveh Akbar ' Delicious propulsive reading '
Vogue 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. 'Rarely has the wildness and
bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat' Garth Greenwell
