Heavens

A STORY OF LOVE COMPLICATED BY TIME TRAVEL'What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is' Kamila Shamsie, author of Home FireNew 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.

Bewitchingly complex...truly astonishing...capable of eliciting from even the most jaded reader both a kind of startled surprise and an unqualified admiration, An electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... playful, tender and heart breaking, [Newman] matches rich, pin-sharp, sometimes dandyish, sometimes economic prose with a wild imagination, Genre-defying... captivating... Millennia ahead of the game... readers will be drawn into this uncanny dream of a story by Newman's genius for summoning feeling, Throughout Sandra Newman's new novel, there is an exquisitely calibrated strangeness... expertly tricked out... miraculously skilful...She is simply unerring, deeply read and possessed of a phenomenal ear for diction... 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

Sandra Newman is the author of three previous 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 Bailey's Prize for Women's Literature). She co-authored the hugely successful How Not to Write a Novel. She has also written The Western Lit Survival Kit, Read This Next, and a memoir, Changeling. She lives in New York.