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.
