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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.