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.

For years Kate has dreamed of another land in another time, Albion, where she is a different person (Emilia) but when she falls in love with Ben her dreams increase and when she wakes up her world in 2000 has changed, and not always for the better. The people around her are worried that she is unwell and she becomes afraid of how her dream actions as Emilia will affect her future.

It’s a work of literary fiction, so I came away with an increased vocabulary and with an appreciation of the authors word play and world building. I found it hard to believe in the Ben/Kate love story, but perhaps that is because it was constantly changing following Kate’s time altering actions.

I recommend #TheHeavens it’s an imaginative idea executed well.

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for my free advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review.

In Sandra Newman's new novel, a woman’s ability to travel back in time in dreams—specifically, to 16th-century Britain—morphs into a world-altering liability. The premise and the opening of this novel appears simple. Ben falls in love with Kate, who is eccentric and believes that, when she dreams, she time-travels.

The couple live in the year 2000, in New York City, which appears fairly normal at first. That is, until you realise that this is an alternate reality in which there is a female Green Party US president, and that world events don’t match up. The novel ends up grappling with what is considered reality? And whether Kate is truly time-travelling or suffering from a mental health issue.

I found the initial premise rather bland, and the magical realism at times trite. However, the novel only begins to gain speed near the end where we see this alternate reality.

I really thought I would love this. It's a time travelling, dystopian love story. What's not to love? From my point of view sadly pretty much the whole thing. I found it to be disjointed in the extreme, with navel gazing characters I just couldn't care about. I kept reading out of curiosity, would it get better or start to be a little more cohesive? Nope. Unfortunately not one I enjoyed at all.

Imaginative set-up; the butterfly effect and time slip are handled cleverly and accomplished without labouring the point - there is a measured and intriguing use of details for the dislocations between timelines. The plot could seem outlandish if you examined it closely, but you could say that for many time slip/parallel world storylines, and the author succeeds here because the writing is well paced and economical, and you get carried along by characters and events. She also resists being obvious or too tidy in the book’s resolution.

The Heavens actually was a quite enjoyable read. It was well written with a very good pace. Maybe sometimes a little too fast changing time zones.
When there are multiple stories, it's inevitable to like one more than other. So, I was more fond of the New York one. It included romance more than I anticipated, but I enjoyed it in the end too.
I think it was a solid plot, characters, fun time travel aspect. At times, it was dragging too much, and it could be shorter. But, otherwise I'd recommend it.
Thanks a lot to NetGalley and the publisher for granting a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’m still attempting to digest this in my head and come to a definite conclusion of how I felt about this book. I described it to a friend as like watching someone live out every eventuality of a choose your own adventure book, which does it absolutely zero justice.

Kate’s fog and confusion is mentioned quite a bit, she ‘forgets’ and isn’t aware of major occurrences both personal and global, which result in there being multiple (intentional) contradictions of plot within the story and also meant that I had moments of confusion along with her, for some this may have been irritating, but I found that for me it added to the story. I imagine that it would be a nearly an impossible thing to present a book with an ever changing plot with only minute differences, but it’s done in such a way that I as the reader never felt confused.

I will hold my hands up and admit that the historical language slowed me down at first - there were entire paragraphs of Kate/Emelia’s dreams that I read several times over before it fully went in - but once they became more detailed, I felt I settled into the flow of language.

This would make a fantastic book club read because there are so many layers, contradictions and intricacies to unpick and discuss, love it or hate it, you’d be discussing it for hours.

The Heavens is a brilliantly well written, incredibly layered and quite peculiar (in an off kilter walking up a down escalator sort of way).

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

The opening of this novel is positively utopian - it’s the year 2000, there is a female environmentalist president in the White House and the world is at peace, Ben and Kate fall in love in Manhattan but Kate is experiencing an alternate reality in her dreams where she is Emilia, cousin of Elizabeth I in sixteenth-century England. This is a genre-bending book and there is a lot going on - historical fiction, dystopia/utopia, romance, characters with mental illness, time travel, magical realism and more. Unfortunately I think the story got a bit bogged down in all of the different themes and genres presented here and the main protagonists themselves were not as engaging as I had hoped they would be. I would still recommend it to readers with a taste for wacky sci-fi, but this one wasn’t really for me unfortunately.

The Heavens sounded like my kind of book but unfortunately the style of writing felt a bit like wading through treacle. Try as I might I just couldn’t move past the 4% mark on my kindle.

In New York, in the year 2000 Kate and Ben meet at a party and fall in love. It is the first year without a war anywhere. Kate falls asleep, knowing she is loved.

In London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia - the mistress of a nobleman - and finds the plague at her door. Suffering premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save it but every decision she makes will change her life with Ben for ever.

A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel. Unfortunately for me I never got that far.

The concept was good but for me the execution was lacking.

The Heavens is such a difficult book to review, as it spans several genres and is rather different to anything I’ve read before. The basic synopsis is centred around Kate and Ben, who meet in the year 2000 and fall in love. This is a 2000 that’s like our own, yet different in many subtle yet significant ways. It soon becomes apparent that Kate is just as ‘different’, as she explains that she often dreams of a previous life in Elizabethan England. As the dreams become more ‘real’, and Kate realises that her actions in the past are affecting her present, Ben begins to think that Kate may be losing her sense of reality.

This was fast paced, and the writing for the most part was well done. I struggled with the sections set in the past as I found the writing style quite jarring and difficult to get into, and the constant chopping and changing between the many different time periods also got a bit cumbersome and confusing as each jump leads to changes in the ‘present’. I actually found myself longing for more sections set in the present so we could really get to know Kate and Ben more before some event from the past begins to change them - although I think that the idea for this was quite unique. I just found no real emotional connection to either of them, because their personalities change and evolve so rapidly.

It’s a complex plot really, that requires some concentration on the readers part to really get the most out of the text. It deals with a number of important questions such as the idea that history can indeed repeat itself, and that if we could change history to better the present, would we? I could delve deeper into the plot here, but I believe that each reader will interpret the text differently and reach a different conclusion as to what is really going on - which is a real draw to the story.

It certainly was rather though provoking, I just wish I’d liked the characters more.

An imaginative, genre-defying tale of time travel and the butterfly effect

At a glittering party in New York in the first summer of the new millennium, geologist and poet Ben meets artist Kate, and the two embark on a passionate romance. The gleaming world they inhabit is almost utopian: the planet is well on the way to decreasing carbon emissions, there is peace in the Middle East, and poverty is being eradicated. However, Kate is prone to a recurring dream that she has had since childhood: a vivid dream of existing as another person, in another place. As she falls more deeply in love with Ben, her dream becomes stronger and more real, and with it her sense that from within the dream she is somehow meant to save the world.

In her dream, she meets an actor named William Shakespeare, unknown to history in her world, who claims, like her, to have once been a time traveller in his own dreams. Each time Kate awakens from her dream, New York and the world around her is a little different; she realises that every action she is taking in the past is changing the world and not necessarily for the better. Gradually, Kate’s dream life becomes ever more potent, her visions of an apocalyptic city become more terrifying, and the changes in her present life escalate to the point where she begins a downward spiral that leads Ben and her friends to start questioning her sanity. Is Kate’s dream real? Is she a time traveller with the means to affect the future or is she suffering from mental illness?

Blending elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction and contemporary romance, The Heavens is an unusual and intriguing novel which defies categorisation. Since Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, the chaos theory term ‘butterfly effect’ has been a staple of science fiction, as of course has time travel. As in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, which is equally difficult to classify genre-wise, the character’s time travelling is seen as a disorder; in this case, Kate is diagnosed with schizophrenia. One of the novel’s most powerful aspects is its depiction of the terrors of mental illness: of reality not making sense, of one’s life crumbling, of memories that turn out not to be real, and the vertiginous imbalance of reality and illusion.

Beautifully written, the book cleverly alternates between contemporary language in modern-day New York and Elizabethan vernacular in Shakespeare’s England. For Renaissance literature fans, there is the added thrill that Kate’s dream persona is Emilia Bassano Lanier, the early feminist poet and author of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), who is believed by some to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets; she is also the heroine of Michael Baldwin’s 1998 novel Dark Lady and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 play Emilia, premiered at the Globe Theatre. Overall, although the plot is occasionally slow and meandering, The Heavens is an interesting, imaginative and intelligent read.

Arwen Evenstar

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review

Fascinating, as well as a rather ambitious, premise which Newman pulls off rather well. While there was a lot to like within the novel, some aspects of the story didn't quite click for me. I do think, however, people who enjoy romantic fiction with a time travelling theme will really enjoy this.

With thanks to Netgalley and Granta for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

I really didn't know what to expect from this but I enjoyed it so much. It's more literary than I would usually read but something abut it really worked for me; the magical realism and the disjointed realities were fascinating, and I really connected with the writing.

Whittling down the plot of “The Heavens” to its bare bones makes it sound incomprehensible, if not downright silly. However, I’ll try to do it justice with as few spoilers as possible.

The novel’s “present” is set in New York around the year 2000. Except it’s not the city as we know it, but one which is different in subtle yet significant ways. A female, environmentalist President has been elected, it’s “the first year with no war at all” and there’s a general sense of utopian optimism. In other words, all’s right with the world.

It’s certainly all right with Ben’s world. He’s just fallen in love with Kate and can’t believe his luck. Kate is smart and beautiful. She’s exotic, describing herself as Hungarian-Turkish-Persian, three romantic, impractical strains, three peoples who had thrown away their empires. She moves within a glamorous set of friends who welcome Ben into their fold.

Soon, Ben learns that Kate has a strange recurring dream in which she visits an alternative reality. As her relationship with Ben gets stronger, the dream also becomes more defined and we realise that, in her sleep, she is travelling to late 16th century England, and experiencing it as (the historical) Emilia Lanier. Lanier was a poet and musician, mistress to the cousin of Elizabeth I, and wife of court musician Alfonso Lanier. Emilia is also sometimes touted as the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

On each return to the “present”, Kate notices that the world has changed from the way she left it, and often for the worse – this sets her on a mission to change the past, in the hope of creating a better future. But the second part of the novel also presents us with a radically – and tragically – different possibility, namely that this whole time-travel thing is all in Kate’s mind, even though the novel’s post-apocalyptic ending leaves it up to us to figure out what is really happening between the book’s pages.

This is a quirky novel with an appropriately quirky set of characters. Ben and Kate/Emilia are the protagonists, but Kate’s set of friends provide an eccentric supporting cast, adroitly reflected in the court circles frequented by Emilia. It might not be a perfect comparison, but “The Heavens” reminded me somewhat of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – firstly in the idea of different eras impinging on each other but, more importantly, in its mixture of genres. “The Heavens” is part romance, part historical fiction/alternative history, part science-fiction, part fantasy/speculative fiction with a touch of magical realism. On one level, it can also be read as an expression of millennial angst – there’s an important scene which recreates the 9/11 attacks, making it the third novel I’ve read in the past few months which in some way or another references a defining event of recent history. (Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation and R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries)

There’s similar variety in the style – which shifts from realistic narration to poetic description, from tragedy to comedy and back to something-in-between.


If it’s eclectic in its influences and style, “The Heavens” is equally varied in the subjects it addresses. Now whilst I don’t mind genre-hopping one bit and actually love a novel which breaks barriers between genres, the boring part in me still tries to find an “anchoring” theme, subject or message. In this regard, “The Heavens” is more like a colourful butterfly which flits impulsively from one theme to the next. The novel could be an ideal book club choice as it provides plenty of discussion material. Just a few of the questions raised:



· How does the past affect the present?

· Does history repeat itself?

· Is the idea that we can affect the future merely an illusion?

· On a larger scale, can politics really change the world for the better?

· Is there a place for utopia and ideals?

· Can art...music...literature... change the world?

· Can love change the world?

· What does it mean to be happy and can one be happy when the world’s in a bad state?

· What does it mean to live with mental health problems or with a person with (possibly) mental health issues?


They’re not easy questions and the novel does not provide easy answers, which might be frustrating for some readers and quite the contrary for others. What’s more impressive is that these themes are addressed (or, at least, raised) in a novel which often displays a light, playful touch.

I was intrigued by the premise of the book, and very keen to read it. But sadly, for me, it didn't live up to expectations. It brought up a lot of comparisons to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, and not in a good way. But as with most books, there were elements that I liked, and elements that I didn't.

1. The concept - I love time travel and alternate history stories, and there were definitely elements of that that I enjoyed in this book. Without spoiling anything, Newman has done some really interesting things with the contemporary setting, some of which took me longer to pick up on than they should have
2. The side characters - the secondary characters in this book are wonderful. Kate has an eclectic and eccentric group of friends, and they bring such colour and life to the book. Even as things become more complicated for Ben and Kate, the friends provide a grounding element, recognisable characters that the reader recognises and can follow throughout the story
3. The sense of place - throughout the book, I felt like Newman's descriptions and settings were wonderful. Particularly in the contemporary sections, New York comes to life, strange and bright and full of interest. As someone who often finds it more difficult to really get a clear picture of a setting, Newman made that very easy for me and it helped me feel more engaged in the book

And then there were the things I didn't enjoy:

1. The main characters - my main issue with the book was that I didn't like either Ben or Kate. I found Kate to be too ditsy for my liking, floating around from one thing to the next, seemingly without great purpose. Ben, on the other hand, had plenty of purpose, but he often came across, at least to me, as untrustworthy and prone to letting his insecurities make him treat others poorly. 
2. The historical storyline - for me personally, as someone who's not a huge fan of historical fiction, I struggled with how much of the book was set in the past/Kate's dream world. I also found it hard to keep track of all the characters in the historical sections (particularly with a fairly large cast in the contemporary sections as well), and in general, felt that the writing in these sections wasn't as strong as in the contemporary sections
3. The representation of Kate's experience and mental illness - as with so many litfic books that incorporate elements of magical realism/SF/fantasy, the characters in The Heavens are never completely certain what parts of Kate's story are true and what aren't. And where there's that uncertainty, the possibility that Kate might be dealing with a mental health problem comes up. To me, this structure, this storytelling trope, feels like it's doing a disservice to both the representation of mental health in fiction, and the genre fiction in which these ideas are typically explored in greater detail. I recognise, again, that that's quite a personal view, but it does really explain a significant reason why I didn't really enjoy this book

Overall, this book was not for me. I think a lot of why I didn't enjoy it was to do with my personal reading preferences, so I can see other readers enjoying it more than I did. So if you enjoy literary fiction with some SF/magical realism elements, and dual contemporary/historical storylines, this might be a book for you.

This is a hard book to review without giving away not so much the plot as my interpretation of it... which, from the reviews, rather differs from the way others have read it. On the surface, this is a book about time travel, saving the world, and dreaming an alternative life as Emilia Lanier (erroneously, again, constructed as Shakespeare's 'dark lady' and inspiration for various play characters - in reality, Lanier was a poet in her own right) - but the more you think about it, the cleverer this book is, with the clues coming from the songs of Poor Tom (King Lear).

Despite the cleverness, this can be a chore to read, especially the dream sections with their cod-Renaissance English - there is a reason for this, but it's not immediately clear while reading. Ultimately, this is closer to The Bell Jar than time-slip Back to the Future-style narrative... I think!

Sandra Newman's The Heavens is an enjoyable and very readable peculiarity - think a litfic version of Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, coupled with the cosy, affectless present day speculative fiction of Douglas Coupland, maybe. I found the New York sections rather more compelling than the Emilia ones, which although vividly and lyrically imagined struggled to overcome the mannered quality of the dialogue (prithee, sir?). The prose is keenly visual and often very lovely, and although I can see the ruptured, elliptical nature of the plot (and the deliberate woolliness of the time travel, so to speak - this is really litfic rather than genre) frustrating people I found it rather moving, eventually. A pleasingly odd curio, and a slanting look at the current tendency towards strictly utopian or apocalyptic political thought.

An odd book about love, life and time travel.

Set in New York, Ben meets Kate on the eve of the Millenium, at a party for politically active twenty somethings, and the pair fall in love. Kate is an ethereal, free spirit wracked by a vivid recurring dream since childhood. In the dream, Kate is Emilia, the mistress of an Elizabethan nobleman.

As Ben and Kate’s relationship intensifies, so does Kate’s dream. For Kate, the dream becomes increasingly real and compelling until it threatens to overwhelm her life and even shape the future.

I was offered an ARC direct from the publishers due to my enthusiastic reviews on previous works by the publishers and was happy to give this a go.
It was a light read, slightly whimsical, well written, but a little confused.
The story alternates between Kate in Elizabethan England (Shakespeare even pops up) and modern day New York. Usually with this kind of trope there is a favoured timeline and mine was certainly modern day. It was quite interesting that every action in the Elizabethan timeline effected the future and it was quite fun seeing the outcome.

The lead characters along with a rich and vibrant supporting cast pull the book along but I didn’t really take to Kate as a character. She was too fluffy for me, and a little annoying (although she did have a lot to contend with!). The characters around her do their best to support their friend with her ‘mental health’ issues and dismiss the stories of time travel and re shaping the future. It is through them that the themes of love and friendship, and attempts to deal with mental illness, shine through.

I enjoyed this enough. It was a light, unusual, slightly confusing tale of time travel and alternative realities, past, present and several possible futures. It’s also a very visual book and it may work better on screen.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC, in return for an honest review.

This is a story of time travel and alternate universes, of love, treachery, betrayal and redemption. In Newman’s world, the year is 2000, a woman sits in the Oval Office and the world is free from war. Kate meets Ben at a party and it’s love at first sight. Then Kate wakes up in the year 1593, in London. Here she is Emilia, mistress of a nobleman, surrounded by a sea of chaos, as plague burns throughout the city. Believing she can save the world in 1593, Kate sets in motion a series of events that will not only change the past, but the future, her future. This is the Butterfly Effect on steroids, engrossing, fascinating and heartbreaking

Thankyou to NetGalley, Granta Publications and Sandra Newman for the opportunity to read a copy of The Heavens in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
I was excited about this book from its description. I thought it promised so much.
Unfortunately, for me, the storyline did not live up to it's promise. I thought the story dragged for most of the book.
Sorry, but not a book for me.

I thought this was brilliant - it's a complicated story, beginning when Ben meets Kate in the year 2000. Kate has another life in the 16th century through her dreams, and her actions there change the course of history and the world that she wakes up to. It's incredibly well written, and the visions of an alternative (better) existence that changes to the world that we know are tantalising. Kate sometimes wakes up to a world different to the one she went to sleep in, and her confusion at how the world can be this way is well realised.

It's a difficult book to categorise, there's a love story at its heart but it isn't really a romance. There's time travel, but it's through dreams and Kate has no control over where she goes, or knowledge of exactly how things might change. There are political campaigners (friends of Ben and Kate) but as well as being friends they're there to give context, and the politics is on the fringe of the story a little.

The book isn't terribly long, and it's definitely worth reading!