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The Heavens: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Sandra Newman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 828 ratings
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“This electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness moves between Elizabethan England and 21st-century New York.” —The Guardian

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

New York, late summer, 2000. A party in a spacious Manhattan apartment, hosted by a wealthy young activist. Dozens of idealistic twenty-somethings have impassioned conversations over takeout dumplings and champagne. The evening shines with the heady optimism of a progressive new millennium. A young man, Ben, meets a young woman, Kate—and they begin to fall in love.

Kate lives with her head in the clouds, so at first Ben isn’t that concerned when she tells him about the recurring dream she’s had since childhood. In the dream, she’s transported to the past, where she lives a second life as Emilia, the mistress of a nobleman in Elizabethan England. But for Kate, the dream becomes increasingly real, to the point where it threatens to overwhelm her life. And soon she’s waking from it to find the world changed—pictures on her wall she doesn’t recognize, new buildings in the neighborhood that have sprung up overnight. As Kate tries to make sense of what’s happening, Ben worries the woman he’s fallen in love with is losing her grip on reality.

Both intoxicating and thought-provoking, The Heavens is a powerful reminder of the consequences of our actions, a poignant testament to how the people we love are destined to change, and a masterful exploration of the power of dreams.

“Heady and elegant.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A complex, unmissable work from a writer who deserves wide acclaim.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    248 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Grove Press
  5. Publication date
    February 12, 2019
  6. File size
    4422 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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  1. And after all, belief was a beautiful thing. That was the trouble with atheists (Kate thought); they might be right, but their unbelief was utilitarian, bleak, like a Brutalist building. Nobody wanted to live there. No one could want them to be right.
    Highlighted by 68 Kindle readers
  2. It was the nature of consciousness to care about itself. Put a consciousness anywhere in time, and it would spawn new worlds from its spasms of ego.
    Highlighted by 59 Kindle readers
  3. He was thinking about the butterfly effect in the case of falling for people, the small differences between one girl and another creating a cascade of results that changed your life.
    Highlighted by 43 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"In this tender love story, Newman ponders the impact of individual action on the world as she creates alternative universes, realities, even endings. Fiction as provocative as it is ambiguous."

-- "Booklist"

"The novel is a fantastic representation of the alternate-reality/time-travel genre with reality changing every time Kate returns to the present. While many novels have explored 'The Butterfly Effect, ' the subject is not always handled with such expertise."

-- "Washington Independent Review of Books"

"Heady and elegant."

-- "New York Times Book Review"

About the Author

Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Cake, and The Country of Ice Cream Star, longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR.

Actress and director Cassandra Campbell has narrated nearly two hundred audiobooks and has received multiple Audie Awards and more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07KYXY358
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press (February 12, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 12, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4422 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 828 ratings

About the author

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Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman

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Sandra Newman is co-author of How Not To Write A Novel. She is the author of the novels The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done and Cake, as well as the forthcoming memoir Changeling. She has taught writing and literature at Temple University, Chapman University, and the University of Colorado, and has published fiction and non-fiction in Harper’s, Granta, and London’s Observer, Telegraph, and Mail on Sunday newspapers, among other journals and newspapers.

Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5 stars
3.7 out of 5
828 global ratings
It is a book that you will want to experience for yourself.
3 Stars
It is a book that you will want to experience for yourself.
I liked this book, but not at first.  I felt the book started off a bit slow and I found it a bit frustrating as I wasn't sure where this book was going. The plot developed rather slowly. The transitions between Kate's dreams and reality were a bit confusing. I found that  Kate's dreams were vivid in comparison to the portrayal of her perceived reality.I found this book, The Heavens, to be a difficult book to review.  Personally, I have never read a book like this before and it's hard for me to really describe how I feel about it.  It was bothersome, fascinating, captivating, sad, complicated, and a bit bizarre. My recommendation is to not read too much into this book before reading it. Which sounds odd, but it is a book that you will want to experience for yourself. *I received a copy of this book via NetGalley, in return for an honest review. I would like to thank Grove Atlantic, Sandra Newman and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.
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Top reviews from the United States

Harriet Schock
5.0 out of 5 stars it involves gradually
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2024
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I like books that take me on a journey that starts with a little confusion, a little contradiction, and eventually all makes sense. It’s all about the story, and this is excellent storytelling.
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J. Bayley
4.0 out of 5 stars Alternate realities well described
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2019
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This is a strange book, or at least it is not from any genre with which I am familiar. One other reviewer said it is difficult to review and I agree. I rather liked it but I’m still not sure why. The other reviewers have already described enough of the story and I’d prefer not to add to that and risk spoiling the experience. I guess is a way one sort of experiences a book like this rather than reads it. That said, the writing is crisp and mercifully light on adjectival filler (which partly explains its brevity – a very thin 257 pages). I found parts of the alternate realities amusing in places – just enough humor to move things along – as one wonders if this is going to reach any kind of conclusion. It does, and among the alternate realities there are some shared ones as well. As I was reading “The Heavens” I kept thinking that this is not the sort of book I should like, but I did like it. Having just finished it, I find myself casually reflecting on some of the themes that I detected: solipsism, compassion, confusion and rebellion.
13 people found this helpful
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Digital Rights
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and clearly not designed to be uplifting
Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2019
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Sandra Newman readily comments in the afterword that she's loosely basing a male lead on her ex husband. I believe he died suddenly and perhaps an illness. While that does not enter the story it does feel that Newman's dystopian pessimism may have been on overdrive as a result.

Ben falls in love with Kate. Kate has dreams. Everytime Kate wakes up she sees the world has changing and becoming bleaker. Her dreams are convincingly real and are consistently drawn back to the time of Queen Elizabeth in 1590's England. She has a relationship with "Sad Will". Kate believes the constantly deteriorating present that only she can compare is driven somewhat the by life of "Sad Will" Shakespeare. She believes her role is to save him and in doing so somehow save the present.

Newman aptly captures images of a NY that may be idyllic at the beginning. It's ending is perhaps closer to our own reality post 9/11 in NYC. Her arc seems to say that we our world is about as bad as it can get. Certainly there are arguments about climate change and personal freedoms that are worth debate. But the tone of defeatism deflates the story for me. Ultimately the characters are left to fate out of their control and to a narrator that leaves me somewhat alienated as much dystopian writing does by it's generally overconfident pessimistic views on the future.

So entertaining but ultimately a letdown.
13 people found this helpful
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Revacc
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful powerful novel
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2019
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The Heavens is a strange book to read in our unsettled world. Somehow it’s comforting, to begin begin in peaceful, year-2000 New York with a green party president and devolve into something like our current madness. Ben and Kate fall in love at a party in a very different New York where the world seems full of hope. But when Kate goes to sleep, she wake as Emilia, a nobleman’s mistress in Elizabethan England, waiting out the plague with an actor named Will. Will turns out to be that Will. But no one in Kate’s future has ever heard of Shakespeare. And as the rules of time travel go, every time Emilia changes the past, Kate wakes to a different future. And each future is worse than the last. Ben, who sleeps and wakes as Ben in a present he recognizes despite Emilia’s butterfly effect alterations, tries to explain this is the way it’s always been, and wonders if Kate’s losing her mind. And here’s the unsettling comfort of it: each time Kate wakes to an altered present, the present looks more like our own. I don’t know if it’s meant as a cosmic joke that we can only have Shakespeare if we suffer President Bush along with him. But it works.
Through Ben, we watch Kate forced to accept new realities, her once happy parents now estranged, climate change, new wars and tragedies, and every day, another indecency. It’s validating really, to watch someone as they struggle to grasp the world unraveling into, whatever this is. It’s like telling the heartbroken kid inside you that yeah, you’re right. It does hurt.
Yet somehow this a really damn funny book. Sandra Newman’s brilliant with the absurd and every page is graced with her wit. Anyone else would allow you to get bogged down in the technical details of time-travel. Newman makes you laugh while she breaks your heart and with a book this fun to read, you don’t bother trying to figure it out.
There’s much in this book, it’s impossible to tell it all without giving something away. In the end, you’ve read a love story, you’ve read a time-travel novel, but underneath, in the space between your thoughts and the words on the page, you’ll find a story about what it means to hope.
43 people found this helpful
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Kat
2.0 out of 5 stars Had high hopes
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2019
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When I read the summary I thought "This reminds me of Lathe of Heaven" which I thought was a good thing. I mentioned that on Twitter and created a mini-storm with who turned out to be the author. She made it clear that she thinks of this as a time travel novel, so OK, I am still interested. I am a third of the way through the book and finding it a slog. I just cannot connect with any of the characters and while I applaud the author's ambitious movement between 4 story lines I don't find the writing particularly artful or engaging. I'm still hoping that something will spark for me and should it, I will update this review, but for now I'm using it as a cure for insomnia.
26 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

N. P.
2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed
Reviewed in Germany on November 10, 2019
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The book is centred around Ben and Kate who meet in 2000 in NYC and fall in love. It's almost like our 2000 was but with a few differences. Later we learn that Kate travels to 1593 in her dreams. Every action she takes during that time affects her present with Ben.

The writing in the present time was fast-paced and okay but I really struggled with the chapters set in the past, I almost gave up the book at one point. It switched too often between both times, which was confusing, and I didn't get to know/like Ben and Kate enough before it all started.
The idea of the book is really good but I felt no connection with the characters. I only finished because the book wasn't too long and I hoped the end would be satisfying (yes it was fine). It's not that I didn't like this book, but just didn't wow me, I expected something different.
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LB2
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2019
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This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I haven’t stopped talking about it since I read it. The plot is high concept but beautifully written and both funny and deeply moving. Highly recommended.
4 people found this helpful
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mikey
3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful writing.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2019
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Elegantly crafted, and an enchanting idea. For me, lost its way a little towards the end but still very enjoyable.
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Andiroxy9
4.0 out of 5 stars First time I've read anything like this
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2024
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I throughly enjoyed this read. I woke my partner gasping at some of the really exciting parts only to have him growl at me. This book was totally worth it.

What happens next??
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Sandra L
2.0 out of 5 stars Frustrating read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2022
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Started off by loving this. Intriguing read and that kept me going to see how things were going to pan out. So sorry I did because it just became more and more boring with no mind boggling revelation that was not apparent earlier on. Won’t be reading anything else by this author.
One person found this helpful
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