Goddess Complex, a biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity
Mark your calendars, LitStackers! Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian is in presale (the best time to buy a book), and ready to hit the shelf. Our anticipation is palpable. Published by Penguin Publishing Group, this book is already making waves with early readers. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s on the cover from the publisher’s official description to early reviews that will help you pre-order your copy ASAP. Let’s dive in!
In This Spotlight On Goddess Complex
About Goddess Complex
In Goddess Complex, 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 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 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 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.
Praise for Goddess Complex
“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 the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged
“Goddess Complex is hilarious, astute, and thoroughly enjoyable.”—Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
“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 the National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different
With Goddess Complex, “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
“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
“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 has written a whip-smart 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 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
About Sanjena Sathian, Author of Goddess Complex
Photo by Jules Miranda
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 Fiction’s 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. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets.
She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University. Goddess Complex is her second novel.
You can connect with Sanjena Sathian on her website, on Instagram, and Substack.
Source: Publisher
ISBN-13: 9780593489772
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Pub date: 03/11/2025
Titles by Sanjena Sathian and Other Titles
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