A startlingly ambitious novel from the acclaimed Sandra Newman, The Heavens pinballs through time and space to craft a gripping tale of love, destiny and the blurred lines between dreams and reality. Kate lives in a Utopian version of modern day New York but falls prey to vivid dreams set in Elizabethan England. Are these visions just dreams or something more tangible? And is she really fated to save humanity? A fabulous time travel fantasy, perfect for fans of Cloud Atlas.
New York, 2000.
Kate and Ben meet at a party and immediately fall in love. It is the first year of the new millennium, the first year without a war anywhere in the world. The United Nations has just planted its flag on Mars, and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. Kate falls asleep, knowing that she is loved.
London, 1593.
Kate wakes as Emilia - the mistress of a nobleman - and finds the plague at her door. Afflicted by premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes will change her life with Ben forever.
A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel, The Heavens is a dream bound up in a strange awakening; it is a bewitching novel of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783784844
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 361 g
Dimensions: 216 x 135 x 16 mm
Bewitchingly complex...truly astonishing...capable of eliciting from even the most jaded reader both a kind of startled surprise and an unqualified admiration - Sarah Perry, Spectator
An electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... playful, tender and heart breaking - Guardian
[Newman] matches rich, pin-sharp, sometimes dandyish, sometimes economic prose with a wild imagination - Matt Haig, Guardian
Genre-defying... captivating... Millennia ahead of the game... readers will be drawn into this uncanny dream of a story by Newman's genius for summoning feeling - Observer
Throughout Sandra Newman's new novel, there is an exquisitely calibrated strangeness... expertly tricked out... miraculously skilful...She is simply unerring, deeply read and possessed of a phenomenal ear for diction... immersively real... Like all dramas, it has a resolution, and one of such eye-popping metaphysical grandeur that I couldn't spoil it even if I wanted to - Irish Times
A daring piece of counter-historical speculative romance... The surreal comic tone has a lot in common with Elif Batuman, Patrick deWitt and Ottessa Moshfegh... Intriguing - The Times
A novel unlike any other... magical - ‘Our Pick of the Best Beach Reads for Every Taste’, Elle
[Sandra Newman is] a writer of immense imagination and talent...quite unlike any other book you'll pick up this year - ‘Best New Books for May 2019’, Stylist
A tour de force of a novel... gloriously bewildering...exceptional - Scotland on Sunday
Beguiling - New Statesman
Newman [writes with] agility and aplomb - TLS
What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is - Kamila Shamsie
I tore through The Heavens and loved it. It's unique and brilliant; a house made of trapdoors, where dreams are real and reality a dream. Through this strange labyrinth of 21st century New York and Renaissance England, it is love which deftly, movingly, finds the way - Adam Foulds, author, The Quickening Maze
I was bewitched by the ambition and charge of The Heavens, which is at once troubling and beautiful, emotionally resonant and fantastically strange - Olivia Laing, author of, Crudo
The Heavens, shifting restlessly between worlds, gently encouraging Elizabethan England into eccentric New York, rolling everything into a dreamy, desperate new reality, is everything we expect from Sandra Newman. It's strange but focused, beautifully written and put together, dangerously benign, comic and clever, bright as a knife - M. John Harrison, author, Light
Reading Sandra Newman's The Heavens is like falling up a brilliant flight of stairs. Inventive and moving and surprising on every level, it's a novel that doesn't just play with time and history and certainty: it turns those things inside out. I've been haunted by its characters and ideas ever since I reluctantly finished it - Elizabeth McCracken, author, Thunderstruck & Other Stories
I was bewitched by the ambition and charge of The Heavens, which is at once troubling and beautiful, emotionally resonant and fantastically strange - Olivia Laing
Every one of The Heavens' pages feels like that first shuddering spark of attraction...quick, flirtatious - Dazed
Richly observed and engaging... [Newman] is a writer of wild imaginings... The Heavens swiftly upends all expectations with its speculative strangeness - Sunday Times
I love this book and I think of it like a real person... so elegiac and genuinely moving ... by the time I got to the end of it... I wanted to go back and read the beginning... you've got to read this book...unbelievably moving - Helen Lewis, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
It isn't long before this novel transcends such tropes to reach heights of brilliance - Irish Examiner
Wonderfully weird...gleaming, frictionless prose - Elizabeth Lowry, TLS
The writing is so sleek and the pace is so nimble, nothing is belaboured... a delightful literary bon bon that really took me away, so transfixing - Katie Puckrik, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
A stunning, literary fairytale - Huffington Post
So cleverly structured, it bears instant rereading - Mail on Sunday
Astute, mesmeric and quite alarming, The Heavens is absolutely captivating - Press Association
Really thought-provoking - ‘The Best Books to Read This May’, Red Magazine
Absolutely captivating - Belfast Sunday Life
Sumptuous, multi-layered...profound, serious... Newman is a clever and sophisticated writer...this haunting, pervasively sad novel hits a particularly vulnerable nerve - Big Issue
Prepare to be transported - Totally Dublin
Ambitious... Newman is a hugely versatile writer - The Week
A tour de force of a novel... exceptional... [Newman] writes the most elegantly balanced prose...a formidable achievement... a bravura piece of work... a very good book - Scotsman
This strikingly original, rich novel contains multitudes - I Paper
[A] page-turner - Sunday Post
Absorbing and clever...deftly executed...A great read - Four Shires Magazine
A thrilling fable about love, creativity, madness and what it means to save or lose a world - Guardian
Newman skilfully concocts a dizzying blend of contemporary utopianism, historical romance and time travelling fantasy while posing profound metaphysical philosophical questions - Irish Examiner
A dizzying portrait of love and time travel... Beautiful - Red Magazine
Weird and wonderful . . . a surprising and tender love story - Best books of 2019, I Paper
The best book you've ever read - Sarah Crossan, Irish Examiner
Bewitching historical fiction wrapped in a tragic sci-fi love story... [it] will both break and remake your heart - In the Moment
Imaginatively audacious, this is a novel whose pyrotechnics are backed by deep emotional truth - Melissa Harrison, author of, All Among the Barley
[The Heavens] transcends its labels...Newman lays in several solutions to her puzzle without ever privileging one. The line by line writing is masterful - crisp and surprising without ever feeling effortful - but what moved me the most was how suffused with grief the whole book is; a constant, aching undercurrent of sadness about the roads not travelled and the things we lose - Observer
High-concept... This is a dazzling exploration of creativity and madness in the poignant, panic-tinged end times - Best fiction of 2019, Guardian
'I was dazzled by Sandra Newman's The Heavens...it left me hugely envious of her confidence and skill - Best Books of 2019 (chosen by Melissa Harrison), Observer
I found this a timely read. Shadowy, elegant and topical, this novel threads together the lives of two people. It all begins when Ben meets Kate at a party. But when Kate wakes up as Emilia in Elizabethan England, the... More
Ever shifting time lines between now and Elizabethian times, in a nutshell this book is an unconventional tale of love and time travel. It is one of those stories that slowly seeps into you; characters, storyline,... More
Kate & Ben fall in love in 2000 in NYC. Their world is a little different to the one we know in 2000, such as they have a female president, are decreasing carbon emissions and there is peace in the Middle East.... More
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