An electrifying novel about the delights and dangers of starting over.
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?
“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, award winning author of Parade
"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
“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 Letters to Gwen John
publishing September 9, 2025
A Best Book of the Year, The White Review & 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