Makenna Goodman got the news shortly before it went public on Tuesday: Her second novel, Helen of Nowhere, is long-listed for the Booker Prize, one of the leading literary awards in the English-speaking world. Word came via email from her UK publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Nothing in the subject line indicated the email’s contents, Goodman said. She opened it in her Montpelier home office. “I felt like I blacked out, honestly,” she told Seven Days on Friday. “I mean, it was very surreal. And I started laughing.” Goodman’s second novel is one of 13 books on the list of nominees. Other authors include prior Booker winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout.
Once the nominee list became public, Goodman celebrated. “My husband got oysters from the local fish market and a bottle of rosé, and we ate on the porch with my two kids,” she said. “It was really lovely.”
In Helen of Nowhere, a finalist for the 2025 Vermont Book Award, a Realtor shows a disgraced professor around an idyllic house in the countryside. The Realtor points out the home’s qualities and talks about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. The professor realizes that he is being offered an opportunity to buy his way into a simple life, but, he will learn, the asking price may be much higher — and stranger — than anticipated.
The New York Review of Books described the work as “searing,” while the Guardian dubbed it “a perfect fairytale for our times.” The UK Times called it “wildly original … unpredictable and funny.”
Goodman, 41, is an executive editor at Timber Press, a Portland, Ore., publisher of books about gardening, nature and science. She has written short fiction and criticism and has interviewed other authors. Her first novel, 2020’s The Shame, was named a best book of the year by Harvard Review and the White Review and deemed “startlingly original” by the Paris Review.
While she is interested in all forms of writing, Goodman said, “I think the form of the novel is a really freeing place, a place of great experimentation where you can kind of do whatever you want.”
The Booker Prize, more than 50 years old, is awarded annually to the book its judges select as the best work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The short list will be announced on September 22 and the winner on November 9.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
