An electrifying novel about the delights and dangers of starting over.
Favorite Book of 2025, The Paris Review
Favorite Read of 2025, Granta
Most Anticipated Book of Summer 2025, The Millions
Novel You Need to Read This Fall, Literary Hub
Best New Fiction of Summer 2025, Bookshop.org
In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his story is not actually over—rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated.
Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness?
“A hallucinatory closet drama.”
—MERVE EMRE, Granta
“A truly unusual tale of male obsolescence that is, like the best books (like the best men?) brave. It follows a soft-canceled neotranscendentalist college professor through a psychosexual encounter with a real estate agent—what ensues is a heady romp written with moral seriousness and real comedy, like Iris Murdoch soundtracked by Enya. Books can be funny!”
—MILO WALLS, The Paris Review
“Virtuosically written, with an insanity inside its sanity—or the other way around—that seems the proper use to make of reality in this moment.”
—RACHEL CUSK, author of Parade
“Helen of Nowhere expands one's sense of how a novel can be written.”
—SHEILA HETI, author of Alphabetical Diaries
“Helen of Nowhere is one of the most surprising novels I’ve ever read. Goodman has found a unique way of blending political urgency and psychological insight with an almost hallucinatory spiritual dimension that manages to strike the reader as perfectly justified, deeply funny and profoundly true.”
―VINCENZO LATRONICO, author of Perfection
“Never have I read a book before that seemed to me so much like a dream, both utterly strange and somehow my own. A jolt, a bracing gasp of air, this is a novel for anybody who has had the thought recently that all contemporary fiction is the same.”
—POLLY BARTON, author of Who Am I, a Deer?
"Goodman has wrought an epic in miniature, somehow as appealingly vast as a Greek tragedy or a Platonic dialogue, equal parts philosophy and art that's also delightfully wicked, like something from a fairytale or a fever dream."
—SARAH MANGUSO, author of Liars
“Uncanny and brilliant in its voicing of power and control, excellent on what it means to come face to face with one’s own hubris, be that literary, philosophical or embodied. An intimate and immersive tour de force by a writer with a fearless style.”
— PRETI TANEJA, author of Aftermath
“This is a wild and brave book! Intrepid, reconfiguring, and full of the best hauntings. In Helen of Nowhere, Goodman has daringly crafted toothsome characters you will devour.”
—SAMANTHA HUNT, author of The Unwritten Book
"A furious energy runs through Helen of Nowhere, whose every sentence is a joy to read. This is a book about loneliness and bitterness written with a wicked humor, and its moments of grace are as striking as they are enigmatic. A unique and brilliant work."
—AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ, author of The Anthropologists
"Blending biting wit and gorgeous, lyrical prose, Helen of Nowhere is at once a modern satire summoning Dickens in A Christmas Carol, an exploration of the failures of second wave feminism, and a sneaky ode to Woolf and Thoreau. It’s hard to pin down what this book is exactly, and whether or not Helen is Jesus, a furniture maker, god, the house, a wife, or time itself. Which is why you must restart it the moment you turn the last haunting page."
—ALEXANDRA AUDER, author of Don't Call Me Home
"Helen of Nowhere is an extraordinary book, gripping, daring, and unusual. With a pacing that completely swept me along, Goodman explores the need to steady oneself by valuing that which is dear, by taking care of the love that needs to be nourished. The trajectory through anger into healing feels like a real journey in time—the dialogue flashing past, written with such speed and brilliance. I wolfed it down."
—CELIA PAUL, author of Self Portrait
“Helen of Nowhere is lyrical but succinct, and it’s playful without being pretentious. Undoubtedly, Man will stay with readers for a long time, something that would make him quite happy.”
—Emily Hall, Necessary Fiction
“A vessel for the contradictions of the present unlike any recent novel I’ve read.”
—Idra Novey, Chicago Review of Books
“Frank and brutal in its unpeeling of the professor’s ego, [Helen of Nowhere] highlights how the fantastic can elevate the mundane.”
—Ian Mond, Locus
“Epic in the best way. . . . Goodman’s novel is a tribute to her influences, and a crackling joy to read.”
—Jessie Gaynor, Literary Hub
“A clever exercise in exploring the shifting nature of power.”
—Publishers Weekly
Coffee House Press
Bookshop.org
Fitzcarraldo Editions
A Best Book of the Year, The White Review
A Favorite Book of the Year, Harvard Review
“The Shame is a delicious, important, moral corrective of a novel for our moment of performance, obsessive witnessing, and self-doubt, written in gripping and beautiful prose. Makenna Goodman draws a dark and suspenseful tale out of the feelings of envy women have for one another, fanned in this moment of high capitalism—a shame many of us know and feel, that reading this novel somehow helps disperse.”
—SHEILA HETI, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
“Makenna Goodman writes with blazing clarity and admirable wit about the joys and sorrows of raising children. Her depiction of the longing, self-loathing, and quiet rage that accompanies sidelined ambition is brilliantly complex."
—JENNY OFFILL, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Shame impresses one with its intelligence and artistry. What goes on inside a woman remains the new frontier.”
—SUSAN MINOT, author of Evening
“The Shame is startlingly original. . . . Part of its pleasure is in the construction―the recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make. . . . More importantly, this is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter.”
―ALEXANDER CHEE, Paris Review Daily
"The Shame is a wickedly smart, wry, raw interrogation of one mother’s choices. In sentences packed with wit and insight, Makenna Goodman’s entrancing debut explores the envy and self-doubt that come with selecting one sort of life over another. The reader shares the narrator’s desperate curiosity about how her madcap adventure will end."
—HELEN PHILLIPS, author of The Need
“Very funny and gutting.”
―LAUREN GROFF, author of The Vaster Wilds
“Cutting, furious, funny…”
—MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A Burning
“Sharp and witty.”
—THE WHITE REVIEW, A Best Book of the Year 2020
“A swift and sensual debut…Goodman’s sentences pulse, they are alive.”
—NINA MACLAUGHLIN, Boston Globe
“A slender, one-long-afternoon-at-the-shore read.”
―RUMAAN ALAM, author of Leave the World Behind, in New York Magazine
"The language, wow, but also the searing truths."
―CHELSEA BIEKER, author of Madwoman