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Sandra Newman is the author of the 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 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. She is the author of the memoir Changeling as well as several other nonfiction books. Her work has appeared in Harper's and Granta, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
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The Heavens opens in the year 2000. I am curious why you chose to set the novel in that time period instead of the current day.
The book is in many ways about the loss of innocence—the innocence of youth, the innocence of falling in love, the innocence of political utopianism. So I chose the year 2000 because I remember it as a last moment of political innocence before 9/11. As the book goes forward and leaves that innocence behind, it becomes about finding hope in a fallen world. How can we love someone who has betrayed us? How can we live with ourselves after we've lost faith in our own goodness? How can we have meaningful lives in a world that seems doomed? The characters manage to find solutions to these problems, so I think it does end up being a hopeful novel.
Can you talk about how some of the characters experience the supernatural events in the book through the lens of mental illness, as the characters become increasingly untethered from their reality?
The book is written from two points of view: Kate's point of view, in which she travels back to Elizabethan England in her dreams and changes the course of history, and her boyfriend Ben's point of view, in which all that's happening is that Kate is falling ...
Matt Haig is the number one bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive, Notes on a Nervous Planet and six highly acclaimed novels for adults, including How to Stop Time, The Humans and The Radleys. His latest novel is The ... (more)
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The Heavens
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Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The ... (more)
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The Heavens
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