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    The Heavens
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    The Heavens
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    The Heavens
    Ebook262 pages4 hours

    The Heavens

    By Sandra Newman

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

  • The Heavens is a brilliant literary novel with a plot that grabs you from the opening. It is a book that defines its own terms—it is an imaginative high-concept novel but one that has a powerful impact for our present political moment. We made a speedy offer having gotten great reads in-house and look forward to building on this enthusiasm.
  • Sandra Newman’s previous novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. The Heavens is just as brilliant as Ice Cream Star but is much more approachable, with greater commercial promise as well as the literary power to win a major prize.
  • Sandra is a brilliantly talented writer who has been published in Granta and Harper’s and studied for an MFA with W. G. Sebald at the University of East Anglia in England, where she lived for a time before moving back to New York. She deserves to be better known in the U.S.
  • Sandra has a huge following on Twitter, where her brand of politically engaged humor has become particularly sharp following the election of Trump. She has over 16,000 followers and is very well-connected to writers and members of the literary media (including Lauren Groff, Celeste Ng, and Kate Atkinson).
  • Sandra has a very interesting writing profile, having written memoir, acclaimed novels, and three books about writing/criticism. Coupled with her unusual Twitter profile, this could make her an ideal person for a major profile around this book.
  • This novel lends itself to discussion—about the power of dreams, the questions of how we might try to change our world for the better, and about how long-gone histories still imprint our own. It would be an ideal novel to discuss on radio coverage or in book groups.
  • There is already significant film/TV interest in this title, which is being represented by United Talent Agency in Los Angeles. It is eminently adaptable.
  • Sandra herself describes the novel as “If Jonathan Lethem wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife, but with Shakespeare in it,” or alternatively, “If Hilary Mantel wrote Outlander, but with the apocalypse in it.”
  • We are approaching authors including Michael Cunningham, Kelly Link, Jennifer Egan, Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Lethem, Neil Gaiman, and Jeff Vandermeer for blurbs.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateFeb 12, 2019
    ISBN9780802146830
    Author

    Sandra Newman

    Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Men, The Heavens (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), 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, as well as several other works of fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and Granta, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Heavens

    3.5/5

    67 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A smart, lyrical book about dreaming (but not really) and time travel (but not really) and the small deviations that can affect great change, generations later (the butterfly effect, if you will). The two timelines are interlaced and inform each other in unexpected ways. I immediately wanted to read it again.
    • 4/5
      This is a strange, difficult, beautiful, and thoughtful book. It raises many questions, few of which it answers. It is the sort of story of our time that makes one wish for a different time - and it's about that, as well.
    • 4/5
      This is a complex book, and I think it's going to take me a few weeks to really digest it now that I've finished it.It starts off as a fairly simple love story between Ben and Kate in New York City. Kate has an eccentric group of friends, and Ben is delighted and fascinated by her social circle and her family. The reader gets little hints that this world is very different from ours - the president is a woman, no one has a cell phone. Kate is a fascinating character: she is quirky and naive, and her art shows the sweet inner workings of her mind. Kate has vivid dreams in which she is Shakespeare's lover. These dreams turn the novel into a time travel / historical fiction story.-- From here on, the review doesn't exactly contain spoilers, but might be more than you want to know if you haven't read it --Then the world where Ben and Kate are in love starts to unravel. Ben is certain that Kate has a mental illness. Kate is an interesting mix of active and passive: on the one hand, her dreams and her actions in her dreams shape reality, but on the other hand, she feels like a passive observer as this happens around her. She does not believe she has a mental illness, but she is so unmoored by how the world changes when she wakes that she doesn't protest when Ben tells her she has a mental illness and needs treatment.The book explores mental illness from both Ben's and Kate's point of view: Kate feels like her world is falling apart around her and doesn't have the energy to fight when she's told she has a mental illness. Ben struggles with how to love someone who is so broken, but finds himself unable to keep her out of his life.Meanwhile, the world continues to get weirder and more apocalyptic. It's hard not to read this as an allegory for the current state of the world, as we watch authoritarianism and white supremacy make unexpected and rapid comebacks.This is a complex and compelling book. I listened to the audiobook, and I think I probably missed some nuances of Newman's writing. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
    • 4/5
      Even Sandra Newman freely admits that her novel, The Heavens, is almost impossible to describe. It is part historical fiction, part time traveling fantasy, part political allegory and part social realism. It deals with the effect serious mental illness has not only on patients, but on those who love them. The novel is so complex, and yet only 257 pages, that I read it twice in a row to try to keep track of the time travel changes each time Kate, the protagonist, wakes from her dream of Elizabethean England. I won't get into details about the plot for fear of spoilers but will say that it is the type of story that sticks in your mind weeks after reading. And it helps if the reader is open to time traveling story lines. Highly recommended.