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!

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.