Published: 05/11/2020
ISBN: 9781783784868
Granta Books
272 pages

The Heavens

Sandra Newman

A STORY OF LOVE COMPLICATED BY TIME TRAVEL

‘What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is’ Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

New York, 2000.
Kate and Ben meet at a party and immediately fall in love. It is the first year of the new millennium, the first year without a war anywhere in the world. The United Nations has just planted its flag on Mars, and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. Kate falls asleep, knowing that she is loved.

London, 1593.
Kate wakes as Emilia – the mistress of a nobleman – and finds the plague at her door. Afflicted by premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes will change her life with Ben forever.

A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel, The Heavens is a dream bound up in a strange awakening; it is a bewitching novel of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.

An electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... playful, tender and heart breaking

Guardian

What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is

Kamila Shamsie

Exquisitely calibrated... miraculously skilful... immersively real... Like all dramas, it has a resolution, and one of such eye-popping metaphysical grandeur that I couldn't spoil it even if I wanted to

Paraic O'Donnell, Irish Times

The Author

Sandra Newman is the author of four previous novels; The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), Cake, The Country of Ice Cream Star (longlisted for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Literature) and The Heavens. She co-authored the hugely successful How Not to Write a Novel with Howard Mittelmark. She has also written The Western Lit Survival Kit, Read This Next, and a memoir, Changeling. She lives in New York.

More about the author →