Goddess Complex: A Novel

by Sanjena Sathian

Overview

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 Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s 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 sister’s while her similarly well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.

There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face—literally—with what her life might have been if she’d 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 both 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 so much more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593489789
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304

About the Author

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 a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, Electric Literature, and Amazon. It was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. She is cowriting the screen adaptation with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Boulevard, One Story, and more. Her nonfiction can be found in The New York Times, The Drift, The Yale Review, NewYorker.com, and Lit Hub, among other outlets. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught fiction at the University of Iowa, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and Emory University.

Editorial Reviews

Goddess Complex is the most interesting, illuminating, and bold contemporary novel of ideas I've read in years. Sanjena Sathian has given us a world that's split—between India and America, between acid and ache, between the longing to reproduce and the longing to remain inviolate, between comedy and horror—in a way that affords us that rarest of opportunities: a space to truly think.” —Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of National Book Award Finalist All This Could Be Different  

“Sanjena Sathian has written a whipsmart millennial mystery that charts a satirical course through the absurd cultural landscape of female identity. Funny, searching and delectably rebellious.” —Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn

“Sanjena Sathian’s Goddess Complex is brilliant, audacious, and funny as hell. In a voice reminiscent of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July, Sathian writes about young adulthood with wit, heart, and aching precision. This isn't a novel about a character stuck between two worlds, but a woman stuck between the world and herself. And that's why I loved it.” —Neel Patel, author of Tell Me How to Be

“Sanjena Sathian has written a novel of great wit and daring, a phantasmagoric journey that dazzles at every turn. It’s surreal, it’s funny, it’s raw, and it glimmers, sentence upon sentence, with brilliance.” —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

“Goddess Complex has the rare quality of being both raucously funny and deeply affecting. Sanjena Sathian explores many topics in her second novel, from the surreal world of the pregnancy-industrial-complex to big questions of identity and self-creation. But it never loses sight of a simple, human concern: how to preserve our individuality in a world that seeks to degrade it. In one beautiful sentence after another, she shows us the absurd expectations of our modern moment, and the result is nothing less than spellbinding.” —Lee Cole, author of Groundskeeping

“Sanjena Sathian’s remarkable new novel is as clever as it is unsettling, at once horrifying and hilarious—Rosemary’s Baby, if Rosemary could freeze her eggs. An utterly contemporary psychological thriller about motherhood, identity, and doubles, Goddess Complex establishes Sathian as an indispensable writer of our generation.” —Andrew Ridker, author of Hope and The Altruists

“Buckle up, readers: Goddess Complex, an heir to the best of Kafka or Roth in both its savage comic brilliance and its depth of meaning, is the wildest of rides. I can't remember the last time I read a book that was simultaneously so serious in its ambition—this is a novel, ultimately, about female power and agency—and such a perfectly plotted page-turner. I could not put it down.” —Vauhini Vara, author of This is Salvaged
 
“Goddess Complex is hilarious, astute, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White

From the Publisher