
Goddess Complex
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rukhmani K. Desai
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By:
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Sanjena Sathian
About this listen
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME and The Millions
“Inventive . . . astute . . . sharp and unexpected . . . Haunting and hilarious, Goddess Complex is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study. Like any individual life, the book bristles with possibilities.”—R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review
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
“Inventive . . . Goddess Complex is astute about the repetitiveness of misery, and how pain can accrete like an enclosing wall, rising to block out the rest of the world . . . [The book] takes a sharp, unexpected turn as Sanjana flies to India, where she intends to finalize her divorce but ends up at a remote resort run by her doppelgänger, Sanjena, instead. It is here that Sanjana’s focus on her alternate lives turns literal, the novel swerving into a more frenzied chronicle involving elaborate deceptions, a cultish pregnancy influencer and a lot of blood . . . Haunting and hilarious, Goddess Complex is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study. Like any individual life, the book bristles with possibilities.”—R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review
“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)
“With its piercing exploration of the unrelenting pressure on women to have children, Sathian's witty and wise novel will resonate with readers on either side of the debate and everyone in between.”—Booklist (starred review)
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What listeners say about Goddess Complex
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- Syd K.
- 03-18-25
Psychological page turner
Great narrator, gripping story, darkly funny, surprisingly poignant—a book of ideas that reads like a thriller
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- Leslie A. M. Smith
- 03-31-25
Interesting way to talk about an important topic.
Just when u thought i knew where this was going, there was a twist. Well done!
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