In an idealised if not perfect version of our world where there is no war and an Asian-American woman is the United States' progressive president Ben and Kate meet at a party and fall in love. But Kate also lives another life, that of Amelia, the mistress of a powerful nobleman in 1593. Kate is sure that she is destined to save the world from this place in plague-riddled sixteenth-century London but every time she wakes back in her own time her actions as Amelia have changed the world around her for the worst. We are presented with a story that investigates time- travel, the Butterfly Effect, the influence of Great Men on history as well as the power of dreams.

As a concept it's quite brilliant and original but in execution it falls at virtually every hurdle. The insta-love between the two protagonists is nauseating, like something from a poor YA novel. The world, past and present, is poorly constructed. The present (2000) is unclear and the renaissance setting is almost a parody, the speech so exaggerated that it is almost unreadable, a shocking lampoon of Shakespearean language. Ironic considering he is a central aspect of the story, his failure to achieve his destiny as the great Bard causes Kate's world to degenerate and morph into something more like our own.

The characterisation is poor throughout. Ben describes Kate as "better than women", an awful sentiment and one of many he holds which makes him impossible to warm to, even though we are supposed to root for his and Kate's relationship. Unfortunately, in the earlier parts of the book Kate is indeed the sort of magic pixie dream girl, an unemployed artist who likes to sleep on the roof of her rich friend's apartment.

The uncertainty of reality, whether Kate is really visiting the past and unintentionally changing her own time or whether she is experiencing schizophrenic episodes as her friends and doctors believe. The presentation of mental illness is problematic, particularly in Ben's attitudes towards his mother and Kate. Nevertheless, this storyline is more engaging and authentic than the others and makes Kate more real. This makes it doubly frustrating when a horrific event that echoes the apocalypse she is trying to evert magically resolves issues that have suggested mental illness and removed all the imperfect but interesting ambiguity from the story.

I adored this book for at least the first half - the time travel and the subtle shifts in the present day narrative were brilliantly done. I think where it came apart for me was the attempt to explain it. (The character of José explaining how the time travellers came from the future and there was no way to save the world so each one tried to make their own life special). However I really enjoyed reading it even if it didn’t quite work. It has an enthusiastic review from Kate Atkinson whose “Life after Life” pulls off the repeated-but-subtly-different life idea perfectly, much more successfully than in The Heavens. However, this book has so many great ideas, memorable characters (in their different incarnations), that it’s definitely worth reading.

The Heavens was the tird book in as many weeks to reference William Shakespeare and the Plague, which is beginning to get a little disconcerting! This is a real hybrid of a book, a time-travelling, historical epic of a romance. I wasn’t sure it was going to work – it is a bit tricksy – but I ended up falling for it. Highly recommended

I adored this novel. Movement between time periods is done so well and written beautifully. Would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys historical fiction with a twist!

This book really didn't work for me. I could see clearly what it was trying to do but it didn't pull it off. The author occasionally produces a clever turn of phrase but there's a lot here that's vague, under-done and messy. The time travel sections are particularly weak; the cod Tudor language and the Shakespeare cameo were jarring and I wasn't keen on the representation of schizophrenia. I disliked the characters and the plot lacked the profundity it seemed to think it had. The point of the whole thing was so oblique that it more or less passed me by. So disappointed as in theory this novel ticked many of my favourite boxes.

So good! One of my favourite books of 2019. The plot is completely unique and keeps going to unexpected places. Beautifully written with a very strong sense of time and place. Thanks for the advance copy.

I am in charge of our Senior School library and am looking for a diverse array of new books to furnish their shelves with and inspire our young people to read a wider and more diverse range of books as they move through the senior school. It is hard sometimes to find books that will grab the attention of young people as their time is short and we are competing against technology and online entertainments.
This was a thought-provoking and well-written read that will appeal to our readers across the board. It had a really strong voice and a compelling narrative that I think would capture their attention and draw them in. It kept me engrossed and I think that it's so important that the books that we purchase for both our young people and our staff are appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible - as well as providing them with something a little 'different' that they might not have come across in school libraries before.
This was a really enjoyable read and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for school so that our young people can enjoy it for themselves. A satisfying and well-crafted read that I keep thinking about long after closing its final page - and that definitely makes it a must-buy for me! So good to inspire our Advanced Higher students with some incredible writing

Well written, clever and complicated. Perhaps a little obtuse, but far more readable than Ice Cream Star!

This was a beautiful winding love story told over many places and many times.
It was a joy to read with incredible world-building, beautifully developed characters and wonderfully descriptive writing.
There were so many aspects to this read and many of them will stick with me for a long time.

Brilliant read

The Heavens by Sandra Newman is my book of the year. I loved it—but, in truth, I cannot say whether you will even like it. It is a strange story, a dream-like, elegiac capitulation between an almost utopian New York in the year 2000 and England in 1593. When Kate falls asleep she dreams of the past. When she wakes, the present has changed. Is she bringing about the world’s end? And if so, can she stop it?

Sometimes a book comes along which feels like the author wrote it solely for you. This is my book; I am certain Sandra Newman wrote it just for me. A surprise, then, to see cover quotes by Olivia Laing and Kamila Shamsie, but I guess I can share it with them! The Heavens is a blend of genres, philosophies, style and voice... the back cover reads: “A story of love complicated by time travel”... (I mean, this was designed for me!) But it is absolutely, certainly not for everyone. It’s not plot led, for one; it reminds me of the film A Ghost Story in the way it looks at time and the evolution of society beyond our lifespan... If it doesn’t sound like your thing, it might not be your thing. And that’s okay.

The publisher gave me a free copy to read on my Kindle and, halfway through, I realised I loved it so much I bought this signed hardback from Toppings booksellers in Bath. Original, unique, elegiac and haunting. Thanks Granta Books and Netgalley, and thank you Sandra Newman. I adored this.

Available now in the US and UK in hardback and ebook.

Review by Katie Khan, author of Hold Back the Stars & The Light Between Us

As a youngster, one of my favourite short stories and one that has stuck with me 40 years later is Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder”. In that story time travel is used to facilitate dinosaur hunting – the stories protagonist, travelling back on the day of a Presidential election (in which a liberal candidate defeated a right wing populist) inadvertently crushes a butterfly and returns to the present day only to find out the new President is now the populist.

I find it impossible to believe that Newman was not influenced by this story.

This novel is at its basic level a time travel story of a character (Kate – a turn of the millennium liberal New Yorker) going back in time (in this case via her dreams and to late 16th Century Elizabethan London) and by her actions inadvertently triggering increasingly detrimental changes in the 21st Century – not least in a gradual change of presidents (from a left wing woman to Gore and then Bush) and into a world which starts as a mild utopia and ends very much as our present one.

And the book makes no real pretension early on of where it is going – The Great Man Theory of History and the Butterfly Effect are both jammed incongruously into the first chapter and Kate actively muses on whether her dreams could change the fate of millions in the second chapter.

The book does have additional layers though.

Firstly as historical fiction – the Elizabethan sections do appear to have been thoroughly researched and prithees-aside some of the writing in these parts is beautiful.

Secondly as a meditation on mental illness and an examination on what it means to live with someone suffering from it. Kate is loved by those around her (in particular Ben, the other main protagonist of the second section) but they struggle with her constant struggle with reality and what appears her self-centred despair (that her actions are causing everything bad in the world, including things which they have long since accepted as normal) – in one of the strongest scenes in the novel, their tolerance for her eccentricities/illness is pushed beyond its limits as they struggle to take in 9-11.

Thirdly as a political commentary – why do we accept the state of the world and yet also believe that someone can change it. Further Kate’s bewilderment at the deterioration she witnesses every time she returns – “That can’t be a thing” she asks - is I think a clever observation on many liberals despair at the way the world has developed in the last few years: Trump, Brexit – “That can’t be a thing” we say to ourselves.

Fourthly as a commentary on egotism, on the quest for significance, the willingness to believe that you are important, only you can make a difference, on whether leaving a legacy is more important than anything.

Fifthly as an examination of (abusive) relationships – can we really know other people, can we change them, why do people keep trying – in another well written episode when he visits Kate in a mental hospital Ben “kept rehearsing every childish illusion: that their sex had been supernaturally good and their first months together his one real happiness; that she was kind, funny, magical, as no one else was; that if he tried hard enough, he could save her”

Overall an interesting novel – I can imagine a future in which I may revisit it as a Women’s Prize contender.

I admire an author who manages to take an often used plot and give it a brand new perspective and with The Heavens, Sandra Newman has given time travel a new meta aspect. There’s the old saying that love has no boundaries but Sandra Newman has taken that concept to new lengths.

Having seen a few lukewarm reviews of The Heavens, my expectations were duly lowered. To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed this literary/historical/time-travel mashup.

Kate visits the past in her dreams. 16th century England to be specific. But each time she wakes, in early 2000’s New York, the world around her is a little different. Kate’s the only one who notices the changes and her family and friends think she is losing her grip on reality.

In the original timeline, in the year 2000, the world is peaceful, an idealised version of our world, not perfect, but better. Different in odd ways: like no one has heard of William Shakespeare, who existed but faded into obscurity. In her dreams, Kate interferes in history. She paves the way for Shakespeare’s success, not only in his own time but a legacy enduring for centuries – and as a result the world in 2000 becomes more polluted, more violent, a step closer to total destruction. But this is no random butterfly effect. As a direct result of one man’s elevation to fame and glory, our world sickens.

The Heavens is not without flaws. Each of the lit fic, historical and sci-fi elements, judged in isolation, fell short in one way or another. But they are presented in combination and it is a combination that I happen to really enjoy, so for me this novel was more than the sum of its parts. Additionally, this is a novel without much of a shape, that is to say it does not deliver dramatic peaks or plot twists, neither does it give straightforward answers. And there are some noticeably clunky turns of phrase (eg ‘the baby earsplittingly wailed’). Despite all that I found it to be an engrossing and enjoyable genre-bender with an intriguing take on cosmic karma. 3.5 stars.

A really original and intelligent idea, very well executed. I enjoyed the gradual build up of confusion, and the fear experienced by Kate as her sanity is called into question.

The Heavens begins in 2000 in an idealised New York, a female progressive on her way to the Presidency, narrated from the perspective of Ben who meets and falls in love with Kate:

"New York City, so everyone was interning at a Condé Nast publication or a television program or the UN. Everyone a little in love with each other; the year 2000 in the affluent West.
...
For the rest of his life, he would remember it: that intoxicated moment not only of first love but of universal hope, that summer when Chen swept the presidential primaries on a wave of utopian fervor, when carbon emissions had radically declined and the Jerusalem peace accords had been signed and the United Nations surpassed its millennium goals for eradicating poverty, when it felt as if everything might work out."

But The Heavens is Kate's story not Ben's. And Kate has an unusual trait. When she dreams, particularly at times of heightened emotions such as when she is in love, she revisits the same dream, one she inhabits and which seems to her less a dream than an alternate reality: in this reality it is 1593, in Elizabethan England and she is Emilia, not Kate. More specifically , who is one of the candidates scholars have identified as Shakespeare's Dark Lady.

In Kate's idealised 2000 Shakespeare is unknown. But in her dream/alternative reality, she meets and befriend a young playwright Will and feels compelled to help him in his fledgling career, feeling that somehow that will make the world a better place and avoid another nightmare she has, this time of an apocalyptic future, from becoming reality.

But each time she wakes, she finds her present day world changed, and largely for the worse: Chen is replaced by President Gore then President Bush, although Shakespeare becomes more and more of a known figure:

"She would wake to find the world was changed, as if her dreams were actual visits to the past, and the things she did there altered history. There, she’d met another time traveler, a man who was a minor Elizabethan playwright. They both had visions of a future apocalypse: a burnt, empty city in a world that was dead. She’d been trying to avert that doom, but now she was certain she was making things worse. She hoped the poet could change this picture, but she didn’t really see what he would do. He would write a world-changing play? It seemed like grasping at straws."

The Heavens can't make up its mind - or more charitably allows the reader to decide - whether this is time-travelling science fiction (Terminator is explicitly referenced) or actually a documentation of mental illness. The more moving and convincing parts of the novel are the second of these, as Ben, and Kate's family and other friends, struggle to cope with someone who insists that when she went to bed the previous night someone else was President, and who is convinced that she is responsible for the changes.

“It’s like the movie Terminator 2. Like the worst version of the Skynet future, a planet of machines where all the people are dead. But in my dream, the machines didn’t kill the people. We killed each other in a nuclear war. And the machines don’t inherit Earth. They rust and fall apart. Then Earth becomes completely uninhabitable. It doesn’t even have bacteria. It has no life.”

“So not very similar.”

“Well, it’s an apocalypse.”

“And does anybody send a robot assassin back in time to prevent the apocalypse?”

“I wish,” said Kate. “That would be great. But what happens is, they send me.”

It was rather less effective for this reader in terms of the rather corny science fiction plot, which combines both the butterfly effect and 'great man' theory of history.

And ones liking for the book will also depend rather on one's affinity for the two separate sections of narrative - even ignoring the link between them - a rather kooky version of modern New York life with crazee characters (e.g. an ex-mail order bride from the Ukraine with an aversion to clothes) and a 'Prithee, Sirrah' pastiche of Shakespearian Britain.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

Overall - something of a hotpotch but entertainingly done. 2.5 stars rounded to 3.

Loved this innovative combination of contemporary literary and historical fiction. Newman cleverly interweaves the two time periods as well as the points of view of the main protagonist Kate and her boyfriend Ben.
A mixture of utopian world building, time travel and comment on mental health, whilst at its core remaining a love story. I can see it gathering comparisons to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, with crucially a woman as the central character.
There are some frustrations with some of the choices Kate makes in her actions, and the explanation for the time-travelling phenomenon is all too brief towards the end. However, this somewhat reflects the confusion of Kate's experience.
A difficult book to categorise, but one that I can see being enjoyed by many.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman is set in an alternate version of New York where a young woman dreams she is transported back in time.

This is beautifully written; a time slip that swaps between a modern-world New York and Elizabethan times. The main character, Kate, dreams herself back to the past, where any action changes the future so that, when she wakes in the modern world, it is subtly different each time. There's a host of really quite mad characters - well described and fascinating people - and at times the novel is sharply witty; gently mocking memes and cultures. Kate's modern-day friends are fond of her but think she's very eccentric. Her partner thinks she's properly insane and I found that element of the book slightly tricky. I'd have liked more from Kate about how she felt not being believed. She seemed to accept the insanity labels quite passively - perhaps she even perceived herself that way - and I wanted her to stand up for herself more. But this is a very interesting book - leaves you with lots to think about and talk about.

I was hoping it would become better so kept on reading but no, just no. A jumbled mess I just didn't believe in.
Thanks for the ARC Granta (I normally like your books a lot more) and Netgalley.

I don't want to spoil the plot of this book. It acts as a warning for what is going to happen to our planet if we keep going the way we are heading. It is beautiful and inevitable and tragic and amazingly written. Five stars.