Sandra Newman

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed writer SANDRA NEWMAN—author of The Country of Ice Cream Star—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Heavens. She will be joined in conversation by MICHELLE HOOVER, the author of The Quickening and Bottomland.

About The Heavens

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.

From their first meeting, Ben knows Kate is unworldly and fanciful, so at first he 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 and compelling until 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 she tries to make sense of what’s happening, Ben worries the woman he’s fallen in love with is losing her grip on reality.

Transporting the reader between a richly detailed past and a frighteningly possible future, 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.

Praise

“I was bewitched by the ambition and charge of Sandra Newman’s time-slip narrative, which is at once troubling and beautiful, emotionally resonant and fantastically strange.” —Olivia Laing, author of Crudo

“An elegant and untamed novel that illuminates the soft edges between love, madness, idealism, and the narrative power of the unconscious mind.” ―Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Certain American States

“I fell into The Heavens and it was not unlike falling in love: effortless, magical, seductive, humming with beauty and possible danger. This gorgeous novel is a feat of the imagination. Sandra Newman has created a fictional world that was a frightening pleasure to inhabit, one in which the realm of dreams and its mysteries were as compelling as waking life.” ―Fatima Farheen Mirza, New York Times bestselling author of A Place for Us