Goddess Complex
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rukhmani Desai
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By:
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Sanjena Sathian
About this listen
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 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.
©2025 Sanjena Sathian (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
“Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity . . . a dazzling Operation Shylock-esque hall of mirrors . . . Sathian’s social commentary is riotous . . . and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme . . . This is incandescent.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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
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