This is a weird and wonderful book. I want to start reading it again to see if I can work it out. Kate time travels back to 1593 in her dreams. Her dreams of the past seem to alter her present. Her relationship with Ben and those around her changes. This is a complicated and beautifully written plot. This book is definitely worth reading.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

What a curious novel this is. ‘The Heavens’ is set in 1593, in 2000 – 2001, and, fleetingly, in other unspecified years. The central characters, Kate and Ben, fall in love in New York and are incredibly happy, other than when Kate wakes to recount her larger-than-life puzzling dreams in which she lives as the mistress of various members of the Elizabethan court. Kate’s dream life leaves her increasingly confused: is she Emilia of the sixteenth century or Kate in the here and now? Her boyfriend, Ben, (who carries haunting memories of his mentally ill mother) becomes increasingly concerned and, after a visit to a psychiatrist, Kate is diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Over the course of the novel, the reader is led into the sixteenth century more and more frequently. Kate, now Emilia, takes William Shakespeare as her lover, saving him from the plague through her premonition that he will die if he goes to London rather than staying with the Earl of Southampton, whose ‘beard’ she becomes. Is she Shakespeare’s Dark Lady immortalised in his sonnets? Is her sixteenth century (she’s Iranian/Hungarian in the twenty-first) cultural heritage inspiration for Jessica in ‘The Merchant of Venice’? Much of the historical detail is convincing and intellectually amusing as Newman entertains us with quotations from and references to the plays. However, when it appears that Will, too, may be a time traveller, as indeed according to him was Alexander the Great, and as Emilia/Kate becomes more and more concerned that she has to ‘save the world’, it becomes clear that Sandra Newman is intent on giving us a complicated and appropriately muddled picture of insanity.
Kate’s friends, including her fiancé Ben, gradually drift away. When the twin towers collapse, their despair at her self-obsession becomes unbearable and Ben is called upon to take her away from the shared flat in which she is staying. After her child is born, she is incarcerated in a mental asylum – or is she? – where further tragedy takes place.
Don’t expect to enjoy ‘The Heavens’ as a time travel piece. To read it for this experience alone would be very frustrating as it is not always clear why Kate/Emilia acts as she does in her different worlds. She also seems fixated on having to ‘save the world’ and this is really irritating until the reader understands that this is part of her ongoing delusions. What Newman does manage to do very successfully is to conjure a portrait of mental instability: of the horror of hallucination, of the terrifying experience of displacement, of the lack of successful medical intervention, and of not knowing whom to trust. The novel also focuses on the exhausting pressure of looking after someone who is mentally ill and the sad fact that the afflicted one may never appreciate the dedicated care given day after day.
My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press New York for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

The Heavens is an unusual and memorable novel about love, alternate universes, and trying to save the world. Kate lives in New York in 2000, but one where a woman is president and hope and togetherness fills the streets. Her and Ben meet at a party and fall in love. But when Kate falls asleep, she dreams and wakes as Emilia, a woman in London in 1593, where plague is at the door and she meets a writer and actor Kate hasn't heard of. As she makes decisions as Emilia, she wakes up as Kate to find her world changed each time, and she can't convince everyone that she isn't just going mad.

The concept of the novel is strange and clever, giving it an unnerving edge as you realise how the world changes when Kate wakes up. The narrative balances the bittersweet elements of Kate and Ben's relationship in all of the versions of the world as they keep changing with the story of Emilia and Shakespeare and Kate's need to fix the world as Emilia before she wakes up again. The use of Shakespeare within the narrative is a bit unexpected and doesn't entirely feel like it comes together, but it works as a way of showing how the future changes and he becomes known as a writer. The way in which Kate's story becomes intertwined with mental illness and how people deal with someone who seems delusional and unwell is interesting, perhaps creating questions about what reality actually is.

Fans of literary fiction with a time travel or alternate universe twist will enjoy The Heavens, a distinctive novel that plays with cause and effect and whether people can actually make a difference to events. It would work well as a book to be discussed and have the implications of its premise considered.

I received an email from Granta Books offering me the chance to read an early copy of this book based, they said, on my "thoughtful and perceptive" reviews of other books they have published. Feeling slightly smug, I downloaded a copy even though it didn’t really sound like the kind of book I would normally read.

Having now completed it, I can say for certain that it is NOT the kind of book I would normally read. But the good news is that doesn’t mean I regret it.

The difficulty with reviewing this book is in deciding how much to say about the plot. The novel stands or falls by the plot and by the reader's experience as each part is uncovered. In truth, it is a completely preposterous plot involving time travel, alternative realities, Shakespeare’s "dark lady" (to whom he addressed several of his sonnets and with one of the main historical candidates for the role playing an important part in this novel) and the end of the world. It is set in the past, several versions of the present, and the far future. It is crazy. I don’t suppose it does any harm to tell you as much as Granta Books told me in the email I received as that is clearly what the publisher regards as acceptable to know before you start reading:

"The Heavens is a powerful, moving, and compelling act of the imagination. It tells the story of a group of friends in an alternative, utopian New York at the turn of the century, and the young woman who’s carried backwards in time in her sleep, to a distant time and place where her every action affects the idyllic world her waking self lives in.

It’s a story of love, friendship, madness and time travel, and the lengths we go to to forge a better world."

I could say a lot more and discuss the points where I made the connections, but that would spoil the book for those who then read it. It is best, I think, to go in cold and let it unfold before you.

It is the "act of the imagination" that is key. To enjoy this book, you have to suspend all thoughts of rationality and just go with the flow. If you do that, it becomes good fun. Totally unbelievable, but good fun. But then, I don’t think believability is the goal. I would say a movie version is the goal. Everything about the book feels cinematic: it felt to me as I read it as if the author had the film version in mind as she wrote (I wonder who she was picturing in the lead roles?). It may just be that this is the way Newman writes (I haven’t read any of her other books), but it is a very visual book.

I want to give this 3.5 stars, but that is not an option. However, I don’t feel that I can round that up to 4 stars, so it has to be rounded down to 3.