A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Library Journal • Jezebel ’s May Book Club Pick “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. “A pithy writer who leans into her protagonist’s flaws but doesn’t excuse them . . . Sathian’s treatment of discomfort with the idea of motherhood feels different and new, because her protagonist does not spend the whole book batting the idea around in her head . . . refreshing . . . a shockingly fun read for what is basically a story about a woman having an existential crisis.” —Nora Biette-Timmons, Jezebel “Biting . . . a twisted examination of motherhood and the arbitrary expectations of adulthood.” — The New Yorker “Very funny at times . . . prompts reflection about varying paths toward (or away from) motherhood, about different versions of the self, and about the choices we all make as we mature. Goddess Complex is a memorable trip.” — Norah Piehl, Book Reporter “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 “Wildly new, surreal . . . I live for this shit.” —Maris Kreizman, The Maris 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) “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) “Sathian unspools a wide-ranging, at times hallucinatory yarn that encompasses her protagonist’s frustrations with rigid rules about femininity, motherhood, Indian American social norms, and more . . . Not for nothing does the novel feature an epigraph from the Gothic classic Rebecca ; the novel is rife with doppelgängers, gaslighting, hidden histories, and more, all to the purpose of questioning the behavioral expectations placed on women like Sanjana . . . It’s a noble goal, with fine set pieces that are both funny and melancholy.” — Kirkus “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 c