Helen of Nowhere

by Makenna Goodman

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?

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Audiobook, Ebooks, The United States Of America

154 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2026

Reviews

[Adina ( not enough time ) · Rating 1.5 out of 5]

Longlisted for Booker prize 2026
Book 3/13

…and this Longlist only gets worse. Or is just me picking the wrong books. I bought the audiobook because it was on offer and because I trust Fitzcarraldo Editions to publish literature of quality. Some of my favourite writers were discovered through them. Unfortunately, I am not sure why this one is part of their catalogue. It does fit their style, I suppose, but not the “quality” part. At least not in my view. I saw the negative reviews beforehand, but I’ve loved low rated books before. Alas, I think the others were right and the novel is just…crap. It wants to be, oh, so smart, but, in my opinion, it fails spectacularly. The whole plot makes no sense, it is poorly executed and the ending, just no. I could try to write more but, really, I do not want to spend more time thinking about this waste of paper.


....
Ok, let’s see if I will hate it as much as many of my other friends here. After listening to the 1st chapter, I have no opinion.

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Now Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
Granted, this is whacky and out there (which for me is always a compliment), and it's also brimming with ambition (also: very good), but at the end of the day, the question remains: Why is this relevant? Aesthetically, the idea to shift from a highly subjective justification about a life in shambles to a supernatural psychological tale is interesting, but on the content-level, it falls short. Looking at The Vivisectors (also in the Booker competition), I have to admit that I'm slightly annoyed by readers complaining that a novel of ideas is not plot driven (surprise!), but "Helen of Nowhere" shows that a novel of ideas needs, well: ideas. So my problem is not that the plot is hardly existent and, if it is, frequently nonsensical, but that the lengthy intersections that ponder concepts like the patriarchy, truth in academia, and masculinity are unsurprising and unchallenging - and that's the big difference between this and "The Vivisectors".

The novella is structured in six acts, but does not do much with the theater allegory. The first act is told from the perspective of Man, a professor who clashes with younger female faculty as they challenge his beliefs and methods from structuralist and intersectional standpoints. The university lets him go (we only get his side, so: how dare they) and his wife dumps him, although they tried to save their marriage with a tantric sex workshop in Iceland (again: how dare she). Not so fun fact: The wife used to be his student, and now she's a professor herself, which, you know, how dare she.

In the second act, Man visits a house in the countryside that is for sale, belonging to the title-giving Helen (I mean: Man taught the transcendentalists, let's see whether he really wants to live closer to nature). Realtor butters up Man and rambles on and on about the oh-so-great Helen, about a dream that screams feminism, about the problems of farmers because of greedy chemical companies, about birds, yada yada yada, and then makes it obvious: The house is a metaphor!!! Who inhabits our minds? (I asked myself whether poor spooky house pioneer Edgar Allan Poe didn't deserve better, and the answer is yes). Act three veers into the supernatiral with spirit-Helen pontificating while calling the professor "baby", and that's enough to get an idea about this effort (act five is for Wife, though, and six for Wife and Man).

All this is not exactly profound: Man is a caricature of the old white mysogynist mansplainer who has long been alimented generously by the state, babbling about nature while hating and hitting women and dogs - and when his lucky streak ends, wokeism and cancel culture and who knows what are to blame, but certainly not him. His very version of reality and his sense of self have been verbally challenged, and he freaks out - and the book rambles and rambles and rambles, much like him, who is at the core just a whiny baby who wants to be, well: babied. Then we get intentionally bizarre commentary on masculinity in that vein that mocks Man as an archetype, the end.

Don't pull a Milkman on us, Booker! I wouldn't shortlist this.

[Matty S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

On paper, Helen of Nowhere might purport to be a work of fiction, but in execution, it reads like the secret, erratic journal of a fifteen-year-old having a full-blown existential tantrum while aggressively trying to outsmart their own teddy bear. The narrative voice lacks both interiority and restraint, mistaking unvarnished angst for emotional depth and chaotic noise for stylistic boldness. Rather than building tension or constructing a coherent thematic arc, the prose simply flails, relying on superficial posture and unearned cynicism to carry a plot that feels structurally adrift from page one.

What makes the experience so agonizing isn't just the weak characterization or the clunky, disjointed pacing—it’s the sheer pretension of it all. The book reaches for profound, counter-cultural brilliance, yet delivers nothing more than a masterclass in stinky delirium. There is no craft here, only an exhausting loop of self-indulgence that leaves the reader feeling less like an audience member and more like an innocent bystander caught in a literary disaster zone.

Helen of Nowhere ultimately lives up to its name and arrives absolutely nowhere. Read at your own risk, but if you do wander in, make sure you've booked your return ticket in advance.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Girl I have no idea what this was about

[Doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

Booker Longlist #3

.5, rounded up.

Absolute and utter garbage. Not only does the setup make no sense whatsoever (why would a realtor suddenly be telling a potential buyer of a house the entire history of corporate fertilized farming?), but the execution is so clunky and boring, it was a slog to get through.

I got eyestrain from the countless eyerolls that ensued in part three, when the realtor 'channels' the spirit of the eponymous Helen - it would have been hilarious if it wasn't so tragically inept.

Had it not been for its inexplicable inclusion on this year's Booker longlist I would have DNF'd it 30 pages in. As a Booker completist for the past decade, I wasn't about to let it defeat me - so I carried on. You're welcome! :-)

The long passages that read like poorly edited Wiki pages, filled with jejune psychobabble, are nothing if not utterly sophomoric - it's as if the author THINKS she is being terribly profound, yet what she is actually saying is truly trite and trivial.

Look, I'm about as 'woke' as they come, but it seems that this is just a checklist of trendy MAGAt-baiting topics flung out willy-nilly with no depth of thought whatsoever.

The penultimate chapter, in which the author veers into a childish rant about how another (unnamed) author has gotten more acclaim than herself is laughably adolescent - and also doesn't really fit in with the rest of the book - not that there was any compelling throughline anyway.

Oh, for a large sock full of steaming horse manure to beat the author into submission, so she can no longer inflict such travesties on unsuspecting readers. At least it was short ... Ben Lerner should consider suing...

[Maxwell]

This is the *epitome* of what people who don't read Booker Prize books assume books from the Booker Prize are like. I swear they're not all like this.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This did not work for me, unfortunately. I don't think I've read two books from the same author that feel so different in writing. I liked The Shame for its acerbic humor and charm, but Helen of Nowhere feels like it is trying too hard to be profound.

The plot seems like a hybrid of Mrs. Dalloway and A Christmas Carol in that the events take place over a single day, and our narrator is visited by a ghost who helps him reckon with his life. He is an unreliable narrator who only gives us glimpses into the breakdown of his marriage.

I fear I may be too stupid to really get what this book is trying to say... The main commentary of the book is that the husband takes his wife for granted, exploits their power dynamic, and she performs domestic and professional labour that contributes to his success at the expense of her own. Which is all fine and valid - but not particularly groundbreaking. Nothing brings the disjoint plot elements together, and it could be argued that the ending undermines much of the book's commentary.

Both of Goodman's novels center on the domestic lives of women and how they navigate them in a modern world, but ultimately, I think The Shame is a better execution of it. The writing has some poignant remarks but is bogged down by ambiguity and the inability to commit to a central plot arc.

Thank you to Coffee House Press for the advanced copy.
---
Lucy Dacus gave this 5 stars and that was all the encouragement I needed

[Katia N]

Update 28/07/2026. This novel has just been long-listed for the Booker 2026 (I guess in the grounds of being ‘experimental’?) I was underwhelmed when I’ve read it in February. It seemed the author tried to do too many things at once and not convincingly.

My initial review:

I tend to write longer reviews lately. Sometimes, i am bit worried that people need to find time reading these reviews. But then again, if a book is alive in my mind, i want to talk about it even if to the audience of one:-). However, this review would be slightly more concise. This novel was a disappointment. That is a summary in one word with a bit of more details below.

Recently, we’ve discussed here the potential for an individually-tailored curation in the future of the books’ world. This novel seemed to be an ideal example of something handpicked for me: published by one of my favourite presses, invitingly blurbed by Rachel Cusk as a book ‘with an insanity inside its sanity – or the other way around’ (i am huge fan of Cusk); and also recommended by Merve Emre, a star critic. A novel is structured in six acts, like a play; each with its own narrator. I like the polyphony in fiction. So i could not wait to get hold of the book. I’ve expected something ‘extraordinary’ (a word from another blurb). And for the first ‘act’ it was quite promising.

The first ‘voice’ was of a middle aged literature professor teaching American transcendentalism in a college. He has recently fallen out of favour with the faculty, estranged from his wife and respectively found himself in the process of reevaluating his life. Initially, i’ve had an impression the author would explore the complexity of this character without creating a caricature. At one stage, it looked like she would subvert Stoner for our time making him a bit more self-aware. And i loved this idea. The sentences were good: immensely quotable, ‘cuskian’ in spirit (though lacking her trade mark ambiguity).

But unfortunately it went downhill from there. Unless it has meant like a very subtle satire, the narrative has become very earnest and was reduced to the numerous well-known tropes of toxic masculinity, toxic faculty politiking, toxic power dynamics in a relationship, toxic industrial agriculture etc, etc. Even the Holocaust was brought in on a tangent with a mentioning of a woman who has hidden a jewish family and risked her life (she was not named but i suspect it was Marion Pritchard). It is a very honourable story, but I am not sure how it has contributed to the whole in such a cursory mentioning. There were too much of these 'toxic' themes. But the development of each of them was following a well-trodden path. The attempt to examine dichotomies such as takers vs doers; man vs woman; city vs nature etc have not brought up any new tension between these opposites either. Soon it has become evident that it would be a discourse driven text rather than a voice driven I've imagined initially.

The uncanny element was as well pretty basic by any stretch of imagination. At some stage, a literal crystal ball has appeared and has been used for -you've guessed rightly-to foretell the future! Among other things, ‘a female medium’ (or maybe she was not a medium but just an older woman - figuring this out might be a part of the book's challenge I guess) was advising to the professor how to get his wife back. These are a few examples from this session:

How? You take your clothes off and you take her pants off, and you just do it. You have to enter her (the italics (is by the author. (p 75)).

The woman who ruined your life has taken the place of your mother and you must remove her.

I apologise for the lack of nuance in my judgement. Maybe this was meant to be subversive, but i’ve honestly found all of this pretty tiresome.

There was a nine page essay presented as one of these acts that i’ve enjoyed. In that piece, she did a bit of a ‘Samuel Beckett’, by starting with a phrase along the lines (i am a bit paraphrasing): 'say you are a woman... no, start again. Say you a man writing about a woman. Much better.’ It was pretty clear that the content of this essay is indeed engaged with Cusk or her type of a female writer, a critique of her imagined from a male perspective by another woman. And it was thought-provoking and interestingly composed. But it has lasted only for nine pages.

Overall the book was closer to Study for Obedience rather than to any novels by Cusk. But Bernstein’s novel is much more accomplished. This also might appeal to the readers who enjoyed the last novel by Katie Kitamura. Like that book, this one as well might be considered to be ‘wide open to interpretation’ in terms of the actual plot: who is alive and who is not, the sequence of events, that sort of thing. But Audition is more focused on a specific situation, more tight in its themes a little less performative, i dare say.

I am sure this book will find a wider readership. I would be interested to read more nuanced reviews and interpretations. I am happy to admit if i’ve lost something. But unless this novel was meant to be a very clever, very subtle satire, i’ve felt somewhat let down with this one. It is a shame as i can see myself liking her writing. I blame my expectations.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure what I was expecting, but not this. The first part was fine enough, but as soon as the 'Realtor' part started, I lost all interest. Each subsequent part seemed to be worse than the one before. A lot crammed into 150 pages: gender, climate change, identity politics and 'wokeism', if you will, but none of it really materialises into anything of substance. Then it gets witchy and the ending seemed so ridiculous I almost thought I had missed the punchline, but I hadn't; it's exactly what you think. It's being spun as a sort of feminist retelling of Dr Faustus, but it's mostly boring and didn't feel inventive. The style gets in the way of the substance, and so it just feels flat and vapid. Also, I was positively cringing at Helen the apparition/ghost/whatever you want to call her appearance recommending that the man has sex with his wife more and possibly try anal, all the while continually calling him baby. Once more I find myself despairing at the modern publications I've been reading recently, and Fitzcarraldo so rarely let me down.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She fell asleep early, exhausted just to have had the sun alive on her face for a time. And then, she got up early to sit on the deck with coffee to watch the fog lift, feel the dew suck back up into the air revealing the green daylight beneath it. To pay attention, you had to spend hours. To see the flight pattern of a bee, you had to sit idly beside a flower. (…)

Helen came to know a different kind of language, a different kind of art. She came to see that there are people who live completely apart from the minds that supposedly trigger seismic shifts in human history. There’s contentment outside of all that, a life that sees no use for it. There are people who don’t feel excluded, who aren’t humiliated by their station in life, who don’t compare themselves to those who may be seen as better, bigger.”

Makenna Goodman is a rare bird.

Her first novel “The Shame” was a stunning portrait of a mother on the run, fueled by fury and obsession. A novel walking the (narrative) line, a speeding object on a straight highway.

Nothing is straight in “Helen of Nowhere”.

An aging disgraced professor (Man) visits a house for sale in the countryside, away from it all, yearning for a renewed lease on life. A mysterious Helen previously owned the house. Enough said.

Go in blind. Don’t think. The sublime writing will carry you through. Scene after scene, you will surf the waves of patriarchy, academia, cities and the natural world, individual agency and social constructs, men and women, the self and all its masks. Capitalism. The Land. Rescued dogs.

A provocative and idiosyncratic novel/play in six acts, six variations on perception, identity, ownership and reinvention, “Helen of Nowhere” feels like a hallucinatory trip through the chakras, from the root to the crown. Or is it the other way around?

A puzzle. An indictment. A reverie.
What will you acquire or give up in order to be?

A rare bird indeed.

[Salomé · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why am i doing this again? I feel like every booker prize i’ve read so far has whiny men that feel wronged by modern women

For a novel barely 150 pages long, it attempts to encompass an astonishing number of contemporary discourses: gender, climate change, toxic masculinity, identity politics, academia, industrial agriculture, collapsing relationships, feminism, urban alienation, the exploitation of nature. None of these ideas are inherently uninteresting. But they exist in this novel as topics without offering a perspective that feels particularly fresh or illuminating.

There is certainly honour in wanting to explore these subjects, but simply assembling them does not produce a meaningful whole.

What ultimately disappointed me most was the imbalance between style and substance. The prose frequently draws attention to itself, but without the intellectual or emotional depth to justify it. Instead of enriching the novel's ideas, the style often obscures how little there is beneath the surface. By the end, Helen of Nowhere felt like a catalogue of contemporary anxieties.

Booker Prize 2026 longlist

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think one of the joys of being a reader is when one comes across a book and it just grabs you and leaves a profound effect. Helen of Nowhere was such a novel.

The premise is a disgraced professor leaves his hometown and is going to buy a house in the country. There he encounters a realtor who channels her mentor Helen through her. The professor and Helen have a revelatory chat.

As simple as this seems, this is a complex novel which takes the form of a philosophical enquiry. Throughout the book the professor asks if he is a genuine person and if he is living an authentic life. Eventually the discussion goes to love and how essential is it to our development.

There is a lot to think and dissect in Helen of Nowhere (note Helen means guiding light) the text itself reads breezily and contains some gently humorous observations.

HIGHLY recommended.

[Sarah ~ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Helen of Nowhere - Makenna Goodman


سمسارة عقارات تعرض منزلا ريفيًّا على أستاذ ذو سمعة ملطخة وتأخذه في جولة داخل المنزل وما يجاوره وتقص عليه حكايات حول صاحبته الغامضة: هيلين، تختلط الحكايات وينتعش الأمل في نفس الأستاذ الموصوم ويفكر جديًا في أحداث حياته وزوجته وانهيار زواجهما مع تطلع لفرصة ثانية لاصلاح زواجه..

الفكرة لا بأس بها، التنفيذ والكتابة، لم ترقني قط. محيرة ومشوشة ومتكلفة .. أظن النية كانت كتابة شيء عبقري، وربما هي جديًا شيء عبقري لكن لم يصلني للأسف... هذه النوفيلا ليست لي.
لم أكن سأكلف نفسي حتّى عناء الكتابة عنها لولا أن لديّ التزام تجاه نفسي بالكتابة عن كل كتاب أقرأه- والتزمت به بدون توقف من نهايات 2023 والحمدلله.. وهو واحد من الأشياء القليلة التي التزمت بتنفيذها خلال السنوات الثلاث الماضية ...

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had been betrayed by a system that once valued mastery and now seemed only to value its redistribution. It wasn’t fair, and it was dirty.
What about a moral code. A sense of decency! No true ally would have dared to stoop so low as to question the character of a man so kind, so plant-loving, so mild-mannered as I, suffering so much from being forced into the confines of these women's newly minted stereotypes of maleness, stereotypes that like all stereotypes sought to simplify, to reduce, reduce, reduce, like the theories of my colleagues, theories that were created to destroy, to dismantle and ridicule, as sheer exercises of power.
Categorizations founded on rage, not research. Written with a violence that frightened me. With a disgust that disgusted me. My colleague talked about men, about me, about "us," and she ridiculed our position. And yet I was different. I was hardly a man in its modern sense, but a man in search of his true nature, in search of a pure and burbling spring far out in the dark wood.
It was a kind of game to her, this woman-when it was my life!

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
 
A six sectioned, spectrally slanted, social satire of a novella – which is sadly unsuccessful.

Its basic set up and play-inspired structure is set up by an introductory cast list:
 
MAN – a late fifties academic, a professor of Transcendentalism who once renowned has fallen foul of trends in academia (in particular the backlash against the very race, social background, sex which gave him much of his long-term assured status), exacerbated we quickly realise by his own inherent (and inherited) social attitudes which are increasingly of another age (at least in University social science circles)
 
WIFE – his wife, also an academic, once one of his pupils (rather harshly and unjustly accused by him of plagiarism) who for some reason much later marries him, only for him to long time deliberately overshadowed her work and who know tries to maintain academic neutrality in the attacks on him
 
HELEN – the now care-home based elderly owner of the property which is the location for much of the novel (the fourth character REALTOR is trying to sell it to the MAN) – something of a hippie-based, sustainable self-sufficient, part artistic commune/retreat countryside farmhouse (Helen is seems inspired by the real life - but unknown to me – Helen Nearing).
 
The first section centres the man, and the second the realtor explaining the property with the book’s middle sections then taking a weird turn when the realtor somehow channels the spirit of Helen to advise the man on is career and marriage, before the fifth (most successful in my view has a second person section addressed by the woman to her husband) and the sixth a rather bizarre if not untelegraphed ending in which the woman’s obvious preference for her rescue dog over her husband is taken to a logical (but surreal) conclusion.
 
The author rather obviously centres dichotomies in the novel – country against countryside, male against female in its set up but explicitly in the character’s monologues the idea of Takers and Doers (the interplay between these is laboured to and beyond the point of tedium) and (perhaps more successfully) Anchors and Kites in a relationship.
 
While written in the same genre as its first blurber – Rachel Cusk – (rather detached, cerebral monologue, feminist-inspired, conventional-novel undermining, rather middle-class based) and with the distinguishing addition of a supernatural pivot (another blurber Sheila Heti came to mind here) failed for me to land – with the whole very much less than promised by the sum of its parts and I have to say rather ruined for me by my reading an ARC of Cusk’s latest immediately back to back and realising quite how far short this fell and how much closer it was to Heti at her unsuccessful weirdest.
 
Disappointing.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like an outlier because I really liked this one. It’s getting roasted on here.

It’s definitely out there with an out-of-left-field twist ending that I should’ve seen coming but could’ve never seen coming all at the same time. Haha. This book demands a reread.

An atmospheric look at a dying old world ushering in new rules. Out with the old, in with the new. A change of the social landscape, a shift to new ideas and overlooked perspectives. Who becomes relics and probably rightfully so. Who should gain recognition after being consistently overlooked?

Very interesting novel and a shortie at that. While this book is getting pulverized by new readers, I’m over here mesmerized. It may not be a total slam dunk, but it provided wonderful food for thought.

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ooooo, I got absolutely giddy after reading this book. I loved it so much. This highly literary novella skewers a certain type of self-focused male artist/academic in a delightfully merciless way. I was so on board with all of it, especially the final chapter! Can’t wait to read more by this author.

[Henk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker prize 2026
This feels like ideas bundled together too loosely to be satisfying. At times I actually wrote down: why would I care after reading certain passages, which summarises it well
Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to.

Liking the prose well enough, the structure of the book follows a middle aged university professor looking into a rural home to buy. His marriage stranded, he is professionally cancelled and in general rather tiresome in my view. Then his realtor starts channeling spirits and he is transformed. I liked this last twist even though it was kind of easy to see coming, and the prose was nice enough, but overall there is just too little of substance in this novel and fortunately it is short.
It feels a bit tired, obvious and not cohesive to me, with lots of therapy speak sections interspersed, which don’t really feel ironic (or useful) to me.

Quotes:
This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

Categorizations founded on rage, not research. Written with a violence that frightened me. With a disgust that disgusted me.

I guess I was relieved. But I was also sad.

Beware the storytellers, I told my students on my last day. They’ll build you a world you’ll prefer to your own.

We would say, aliens must be studying us, because there can be no other reason we’re all still alive

It’s the most natural thing in the world, hurtling past each other the way we do, it’s beautiful chaos, and most of the time we are okay.

It is difficult. But in an easy kind of way. I mean, it’s the kind of difficult you have some say over.

Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say.

Radical ideas are always rejected before they’re recognized. You have to reject something if you’re afraid of it. And they were afraid! They still are.

I think a lot about fires, floods, the end of the world, don’t you? Seems like every day the end of the world gets closer and closer, and yet, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it will happen today! Maybe we’re done for. Maybe our demise is just outside that door, and we’re just biding our time until it comes to call. I think the end of the world is the most compelling thing to think about these days. And we keep waiting around for it, like we want it to come.

But ownership is a story, as everything is.

But was it just as possible ceasing to exist was the only way to exist truthfully?

You might say, if you have enough of something to be content not to worry about the basic logistics of living, the mind inevitably goes to a place of desire.

This feels a bit lazy:

It was unclear to me how much of what I had said was internal, as so many details appeared in front of me like I was watching them in a film. I could explain them with such detail, and yet it was possible I had just seen them in my own mind.

All a bit tiresome:

“You love only yourself,” my wife said, “you love others as a way to love yourself, to prove you can love at all. But caring is not something you do,” she said, “care is something you give.” And while I had been technically caring for years, I had never really given her care at all, and that was why she was leaving.

But I cared! I cared deeply.

My wife said, no, it was all a lie, the yesses were really nos and I was a “No” person, and she was looking for happiness.

Ok who cares:

At least I had offered, and yet I was happy no one had come because I didn’t really want to share, I had only wanted to extend the invitation and have them ignore it.

This feels true of the book as well:

But nothing, not even an essence, could transform into energy without an embodiment. Words could elucidate but they could not center. They slipped through my fingers like water returning to its source.

Ok Andrew Tate the elder 🤢
She was affiliated with me, which was its own gift.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

In years to come Helen of Nowhere is either going to be described as too clever for its own good or a modern masterpiece. And I'm still on the fence.

We begin with a man, a disgraced professor who has clearly not moved with the times and frankly begins to sound like ine of these incel types who, having been rejected by a woman (who they have no problem describing as old and past their best without expecting some pushback) are now moaning how all women are just vicious.

However we then move to The Realtor, who is obviously not what she seems. But he is clearly horny and finds her attractive so he stays as she describes the house in the middle of nowhere where he could live a perfectly Waldenesque life - if he doesnt mind the hardship. This goes on for some time.

It is after this that the oddness begins and my interest waned right up to the final chapter where The Man has made some type of Faustian deal whereby he is given a life where he is loved.

I confess I listened to this final chapter three times before I had to accept what he'd agreed to.

A confusing but short novel which, as I say, still has me wondering whether I enjoyed it or not. I'll get back to you on that.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

First Impressions
Is it a novel? A play? An essay? Does it try to be all three at once and not quite land any of them? “Helen of Nowhere” is a slender novel at just over 150 pages that nonetheless took me a surprisingly long time to get through. Much of it felt like a slog, both because it's so abstract in what it's actually discussing and because I found long stretches of it simply tedious. Even though critics have widely praised its ambition and structure I know plenty of readers have found it gimmicky.

Structure and Premise
The novel is composed like a play in six acts, built from extended monologues delivered by four different individuals, though who exactly is "composing" these monologues is itself an open question the book keeps circling back to. At its centre is a disgraced academic who travels out to the countryside to consider buying a house, where a realtor tells him about the property's former owner, a woman named Helen. Throughout, he's also reflecting on his own marriage. My sense is that this novel is about love, power imbalances, and the tension between urban and rural life, interrogating the whole tradition of "returning to nature," from the transcendentalists onward, as either a search for purity outside the trappings of civilisation or a form of escapism from the complexity and judgment of the wider world that this man has found himself mired in.

A Deeply Flawed Narrator
We spend most of the book inside this man's perspective, and he's a genuinely flawed, often misogynistic figure, even as he insists, defensively, that he loves and admires women. He objectifies his wife even while professing devotion, judging her as having faded with age, even though she was once his student, went on to eclipse his own academic career, and now provokes in him a tangled mix of resentment, desire, and something close to punishment. There's a real possibility, hinted at early on, that the entire structure of the novel is itself the wife's construct, a play written to interrogate her husband from the inside, which adds a genuinely compelling layer if you have the patience to unpick it.

Where It Lost Me
For long stretches, I found myself growing impatient. The book gets genuinely surreal and strange in places, particularly once Helen's spirit is channeled into the narrative to put the husband on trial, before the story turns around and puts Helen herself on trial too. Goodman has spoken in interviews about her background editing agricultural texts, which shows in how fluently the book handles ideas about the natural world alongside academia and shifting intellectual fashions. Helen, now elderly and in care, once tried to build something like a commune on this land, rejecting her own privilege for a simpler life, only to come into direct conflict with local people and face her own legal and moral scrutiny, a genuinely interesting complication of the book's ideas about how ideals curdle once they're actually put into practice.

My frustration mostly came from how much of the book stays at a remove. We only get fragments of the husband's disgrace, of the couple's evolving careers, and of how his wife has advanced professionally while also being held back by both sexism and unacknowledged labor, raising real questions about whether a relationship that began as teacher and student can ever reach true equal footing. The novel also leans hard on constant binary categorisations of people, takers versus doers, golden eggs versus plain eggs, kites versus anchors, even while a line elsewhere in the book seems to undercut the whole exercise, suggesting that any such distinction is really just a construct of the mind. That self-awareness didn't stop the categorising from feeling repetitive to me, especially once the realtor's own lengthy monologue arrives. I found this section in particular largely tedious and only tangentially connected to the story, other than emphasising the realtor’s idolatry of Helen through contradictory accounts. Perhaps this relationship is meant as a counterpoint to the Man and the Wife’s, but this feels like a surface point rather than something which adds any depth to the story.

Does It Work as a Novel, Play, or Essay?
Part of my frustration is that the book seems to be attempting three different forms at once without fully succeeding at any of them. As a novel steeped in psychology, it's mostly telling rather than showing, with fairly slight actual action. As a play, it would likely be static and hard to sit through performed aloud; nor does it especially work as a drama to be read. As an essay interrogating nature versus urban life and academic power struggles, it handles those ideas in a way that felt too slight to come across as fully satisfying either. Perhaps it’s meant to function as a modern counterpoint to “The Odyssey”. But, other than following a man searching for a home that involves a woman named Helen, I didn’t readily discern any interesting parallels to that classic.

Verdict
I can admire aspects of this novel, and I don't mind books that feel like a chore when they're genuinely wrestling with complex ideas in an ambitious way. But “Helen of Nowhere” never quite goes far enough in any of the directions it gestures toward, and I came away unsure what I'd actually gotten out of it and doubtful that a reread would change that. On the whole this was an unsatisfying reading experience for me personally, though I know plenty of other readers share that reaction while others find it genuinely daring and radical as an interrogation of a man lost in his own self-justification, and I can appreciate that reading too, even if it isn't mine. If you've read this one, I'd love to hear where you landed on it, positive, negative, or somewhere in between.


Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

CHARACTERS
MAN, late fifties, wool buttoned vest, arborist-style pants with a worn-in notebook crease in the back pocket, lives in the city.
REALTOR, forties, attractive hippie type, selling a house in the country.
HELEN, seventies, hardscrabble but aging well, owner of the house.
WIFE, forties, in a sunny apartment in the city.

Helen of Nowhere is the second novel by Makenna Goodman, and as the cast of characters above, and the chapters being labelled 'acts' shows, it is written in a format that nods towards plays, albeit without speech headings and stage directions.

It opens:

Act I, Man

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I was in the middle of nowhere. I was looking for a simpler life. I had driven all day, alone, to get there.

Man is a professor, or arguably former professor, in his 50s, a once celebrated neo-transcendentalist, now cancelled because, at least in his account, who he is - they called me a ‘colonial artifact’ - rather than anything he did, although the sexism that underpins his life-values is evident from his opening remarks above. Goodman has said the novel was inspired by the movements that swept campuses in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, although the angle her appears to be more sexism than racism.

I had been betrayed by a system that once valued mastery and now seemed only to value its redistribution. It wasn't fair, and it was dirty.

What about a moral code. A sense of decency! No true ally would have dared to stoop so low as to question the character of a man so kind, so plant-loving, so mild-mannered as I, suffering so much from being forced into the confines of these women's newly minted stereotypes of maleness, stereotypes that like all stereotypes sought to simplify, to reduce, reduce, reduce, like the theories of my colleagues, theories that were created to destroy, to dismantle and ridicule, as sheer exercises of power.

The novel is set over one day where he has come to the countryside - the middle of nowhere - to view a property, shown around it by Realtor. The house itself is owned by the eponymous Helen - the character's name a nod both to Troy and to Helen Nearing - who is now in care.

The first Act has Man exploring, with resentment, his downfall, which also led to a break-up with his wife, herself in a more junior role at the same university. The second act introduces Realtor, who in turn tells Man about Helen, but also turns out to be well informed, and probing, on his own situation.

The novel then takes an increasingly surreal turn, with Realtor offering to channel Helen as a consciousness, while another chapter - but possibly written from someone else's imagination, puts us into the thoughts of Wife.

I was taught that the best realtors inhabit the spirit of the house they are selling. They have to be able to see their world through the owner’s eyes, every creak in the stairwell, every quirk of the kitchen, the way the frontdoor sticks in the heat. And when they master a house, it becomes more than a listing, but a treasure to be discovered, a kind of beautiful unpolished memory the buyer can build from.

The novel was for me at its best in the earlier Acts, particularly when the characters develop theories of categorisation - the role of Doers and Takers in an institution, or Anchors and Kites in a relationship - Man is accused by his colleagues of being a Taker, and by Wife of being a Kite that forces her to be an Anchor).

The ending of the novel is, unfortunately, a bit too obvious to be effective - it's heavily signposted throughout (although intriguingly Goodman has said this was sub-conscious, as she had not necessarily planned it) and I guessed it on page 5.

This is a novel whose form and ambition I admired - if a UK author, it would have been a Goldsmiths contender - but something of a disappointment in the execution and the latter half.

The judges' commendation

‘A spellbinding novel or a play with just four characters? In groundbreaking form, Helen of Nowhere blends both to challenge us with a seemingly simple question: How much are we truly willing to change ourselves in order to get back to nature? A fallen professor’s visit to a rural house leads to a surreal and destabilising encounter with a realtor, who shares the tale of Helen, the home’s former occupant. Philosophically, politically, and spiritually adventurous, this slim, ambitious volume has the power to transform.’

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading it, I had no idea where this novel was going to take me, and it was so worth it for the spectacular ending!

I received this book as part of my Coffee House Press subscription for Fall 2025.

[Strega Di Gatti · Rating 2.75 out of 5]

I saw everyone complaining about this Booker nominee all year so naturally, I had to subject myself. Have you ever started a conversation with a real estate agent to hear her structuralist musings on agricultural corporatization?

Yes??? This is the book for you.

Now, don’t get too excited, it’s not all critical theory. Helen of Nowhere also features some very general observations about the frailty of the male ego, the unknowability of wives, the ephemeral nature of power, the inadequacies of leftist men, etc.

There's some mild surreal business in the last few pages of the novel that helps to perk up the overall project. While the book is described as "funny" by the Sunday Times, its most comedic element is the idea of an older male professor being elbowed out of academia for criticism of feminist intersectionality.

Ladies, I had no idea we had this kind of broad hegemonic power in intellectual circles. How much is the tuition for international students at this school of woke wenches? I’d like to register my interest for the 2027-2028 term.

All questions asked by Helen of Nowhere are open-ended, so students can end their 600-word book report with something generic like: “Does fear of being known destroy our ability to connect with others?”

Sheila Heti's cheeky blurb says it all: ‘Helen of Nowhere expands one’s sense of how a novel can be written.’

Yeah facts! Because, my senses are now aware that a novel like this can be written!

[Richard Derus · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE

Real Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well...there hadda be one full-on flop among the Booker reads. I'm delighted to say I did not buy this inexplicably longlisted book; it was vouchsafed me. In a shock twist I *forgot* I got the DRC despite having opened the file, bookmarked a spot with no note as to why, and then checked it out of my branch because...I totally forgot I'd ever received it.

::cue ominous theremin music::

So here's the first bit:

Act I, Man

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I...was not involved, did not care, felt literally nothing.

Ellen, who is one of my longtime LibraryThing friends and with whom I share a lot of literary opinions, said it best: *shrug*

Man, the MC, gives off zero Main Character Energy, which I guess we all know is meant to de-emphasize the phallocentric "Big Dick Energy" it replaced in pop culture. This guy's a cuck, and boring with it which is unforgivable. The clue I was not going to resonate with the read came when I was searching other opinions to see why anyone on the Booker committee noticed this in the first place: It's A Christmas Carol made feminist, built around either archetypes or stereotypes depending on how positive you're feeling about the retelling but not realistic characters. I don't happen to think Dickens did his best work on the Cratchits so no shade cast.

Sound dreary? It was. I'm no fan of Dickens, I'm not hugely impressed by reimaginings as a class of literary endeavor, so the headwinds began to make sense. Maybe if I *loooved* A Christmas Carol...? But instead I have a true cuck Ebenezer, a Present in the too-chatty Realtor, Past in the eponymous Helen of Nowhere, whose stage presence is the most interesting, and Wife as Man's diminished Future. I found nothing compelling in them, I wanted the under-150pp to be over before it was, and most damningly,did not remember I'd read the story at all.

So, on the whole: Glad it wasn't on the shortlist.

[Shreeya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Say you decided to read every book on the Booker Prize Longlist. Say you started with the shortest one.

Say you spent time with the book and it had given you a prediction, that your life would end - not from illness, but from the cumulative damage of rolling your eyes at every sentence of the book - that no one would be able to attend your funeral, that there would be no oration or reflection on your life and spirit - instead, the Man, the Realtor, Helen, and the Wife, would take turns reading passages from the book.

=============================

This may objectively be the shortest book on the longlist, but it felt like the longest book I've ever read.

I wanted to cry. Especially during Act 5, where every sentence starts with 'Say'.

Say, say, say, say, SAY - I don't want to say anything anymore, please.

Somehow, I finished it.

And for that, I'm giving 0.5 extra star to myself.

[Beige · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read the blurb before I started this Booker longlisted novel/play and was surprised at each turn. The paragraphs weren't long but they were full of blazing insights and I found they required my fullest, deepest attention - and the effort was rewarding.

Goodman interviewed @ Chicago Review of Books:
"I love theater, I love that you get to suspend disbelief in such a way as to say, okay, this cardboard is the house, fine, and this piece of wood right here is a couch. You make agreements to suspend ideas of what things look like or feel like, which frees up the mind in interesting ways. I wanted the reader to become so immersed that the set began to swallow them up, in mind and in body, where reality could be completely remade. And then in the end, it spits them out. But where are you? So far, people have had really different interpretations of the ending. Some see it as redemptive, some see it as punishing. "

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2025/09/...

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her story, say men were vulgar and society in general was to be mistrusted. No narrator, no character, was reliable, a trick the writer played on the reader, with whom she wasn’t in solidarity.

In her sophomore (sophomoric?) novel, Makenna Goodman has created a work of Absurdist Metafiction. Think Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, for example. To be clear, this is not a genre I enjoy. In this case, the often meaningless disarray of a plotless narrative, told by a painfully self-referential Man who consistently breaks the fourth wall, often torments the attentive reader. Having said that, I did also laugh out loud at certain points. And I think both responses (pain and pleasure) are fully intended by the author, with discomfort and irritation being a primary goal.

Although the book has six divisions (Man, Realtor, Helen, Helen and Man, Wife, Man and Wife), we have everything presented to us obliquely through Man’s point of view. While there are moments within each section where Man is criticized by others and revealed to be a weak, pompous creep lacking in self-awareness, these “Acts” end with him feeling more confident, successful, and justified in the choices he has made. Man’s need for acceptance, praise, and understanding transforms the voices of Realtor, Helen, and Wife until they are to his liking; put another way, until it is his voice speaking through them. In each case, he manages to once again avoid guilt, shame, and several painful truths. The final section is especially telling, in that Man is fully Oedipal, with Wife now as a Mother who tolerates his sexual advances. We are given a farcical viewpoint that justifies all of Man’s character flaws and reprehensible urges. He effectively gives himself permission to continue life unchanged in any way.

As for the rare comical moments, I especially enjoyed the therapeutic visualization session that shifts from an exercise in mindfulness and healing to a full-blown revenge fantasy. You can see it coming but it’s still darkly comic when it arrives.

Isn’t it a joke, how you can tell a story and other people hear a different story than the one you told?

If this was a part of Goodman’s mission – and I suspect it was - she has been extremely successful.

3.5 stars

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me, I am not the right reader for this book. If you’re here for vibes rather than certainty, with a high threshold for ick factor, you might enjoy it. I could appreciate that the author really takes you right into the psyche of her central character but I didn’t want to be there.

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I didn't like this book, I'm not sure who the target audience actually might be. I usually love books where things aren't really clear, and the reader needs to figure out what is going on (I loved Audition and The Man Who Saw Everything).

But unfortunately, my love for these types of books requires that I finish the book and at least have a theory.

I just finished this novel. And so far I have no theory.

The book started off with an intriguing first chapter. A man is struggling with his career as a professor and with his marriage. There's a LOT of social commentary in this book, but it's basically hanging on the thinnest of plot threads. Like the point of the book is the social commentary, and that's where you lose me.

Entertain me.
Intrigue me.
Wow me with your mastery of craft.

But I don't want to read thinly disguised editorial masquerading as a story. Please tell me why I am wrong, what I missed.

My two stars are hanging on the first chapter and an intriguing structure (play like). But I am willing to re-read and re-consider. Let me know why I should!

Update: Someone else helpfully shared a spoiler that explained the ending. I am convinced he is correct. And it actually made me dislike this book more. But I'll leave it at two stars based on my original assessment.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

When I finished this book earlier in the week I was ready to give it a cautiously positive review, but three days later and having read two more books from the longlist, memories of it are already fading, so I won't disagree too strongly with the collective opinion of the Mookse group that it is one of the weakest two books on the longlist. That doesn't make it an unenjoyable read, as the list is a fairly strong one this year.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helen of Nowhere opens with a cast list of four characters (Man, Wife, Realtor, and Helen), as if it were a play, and takes place over the course of a single day. Man has recently lost his job as an English professor and is separated from Wife. Realtor shows him a house in the country that belongs to Helen, who is now in a care facility. Wife and Man have a fraught history. She gave up her own career to support his, then became the successful one, and his response to that reversal was to denigrate her achievements.

The play framing is an interesting choice for a novel, and I could picture this staged with a spare set and four actors. It begins conventionally enough, a disgraced professor trying to mend his soul by leaving the city and surrounding himself with nature. Then a mystical element enters and the book turns surreal, with Realtor inhabiting the spirit of Helen. That spirit walks Man through a questioning of his choices and beliefs, centered on his sense of entitlement, including toward Wife's success.

Goodman is asking us to consider how we see the world and what makes a person happy. This book’s structure is more interesting than its content. It is another title on the Booker longlist where the experimental style seems to matter more than whether a reader can become absorbed or invested in the story, at least going by what I have read of the list so far. If you like philosophical musings with a mystical streak, you may enjoy it more than I did.