A novel by Makenna Goodman

September 9, 2025 • 5 x 7.5 • 160 pages • 9781566897358

From the “brilliantly complex” (Jenny Offill) author of The Shame comes an electrifying dive into one man’s fractured psyche as he searches for a new life.

Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.

Philosophically adventurous, strange, and fascinating, Helen of Nowhere examines the structures that form our identity, staring the reader down to ask the haunting question: What is the cost of true happiness?

About the Author

Makenna Goodman is the author of two novels, Helen of Nowhere (Coffee House, 2025) and The Shame (Milkweed, 2020), and has written for international publications including the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, The White Review, BOMB, The Common, ASTRA Magazine, and Mousse Magazine. Also an editor, she is based in Vermont.

Praise for Helen of Nowhere

“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

Praise for The Shame

A White Review Best Book of 2020
A Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020

“Very funny and gutting.” —Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Vaster Wilds

“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. 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 Pure Colour

"Unsettling, smart, perceptive." —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

“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, New York Times bestselling author of Weather

“The Shame is startlingly original. . . . . 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

“[A] swift and sensual debut . . . Goodman’s sentences pulse, they are alive, with the mess and ambivalence and artistic ambition and desire for more that saturates Alma’s mind as it asks, with fear: Is this all? Is this enough?” —The Boston Globe