Goddess Complex

A Novel

By: Sanjena Sathian

Length: 11 hrs

Publisher's summary

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.

©2025 Sanjena Sathian (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic 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

“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 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