
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
Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME and The Millions
"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)
“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 . . . This is incandescent.”—Publishers Weekly (starred 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
“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)
“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)
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