Goddess Complex: A Novel

(Paperback, Large Print Edition)

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*Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME*

From the author of Gold Diggers, a biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity

Sanjana Satyanandais trying to recover her life. Its been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sisters while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forwardand finalize her divorce, ASAP.

Theres just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, shes bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if shed chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more.

Reviews

Sathian unspools a wide-ranging, at times hallucinatory yarn that encompasses her protagonists frustrations with rigid rules about femininity, motherhood, Indian American social norms, and more . . . Not for nothing does the novel feature an epigraph from the Gothic classic Rebecca; the novel is rife with doppelgngers, gaslighting, hidden histories, and more, all to the purpose of questioning the behavioral expectations placed on women like Sanjana . . . Its a noble goal, with fine set pieces that are both funny and melancholy. Kirkus

Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity . . . a dazzling Operation Shylockesque hall of mirrors . . . Sathians social commentary is riotous . . . and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgnger theme . . . This is incandescent. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Bio

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by The Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fictions First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. Shes written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets.