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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. 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.
"[A] whipsmart satire...Sathian's social commentary is riotous...and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme...This is incandescent." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Suspenseful to the very end...this well-crafted, mysterious novel with some dystopian twists is a worthwhile read. Fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will devour it." —Library Journal (starred review)
"The novel veers tonally from page-turning goofiness (mainly featuring a dog whose Instagram Sanjana is tasked with maintaining) to noirish melodrama, in a dense plot the latter pages strain to clarify. The depth of Sanjana's crisis is clear, but the story's ever-shifting status obscures her emotional state. An overdetermined tale of status and sexism." —Kirkus Reviews
"Goddess Complex is hilarious, astute, and thoroughly enjoyable." —Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
"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
This information about Goddess Complex was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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