Excerpt from The Heavens by Sandra Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Every weekend, there was a party where these same people appeared in different clothes. There was one intimate party where everyone sat on the floor and told stories about times they'd been depressed; there was one uproarious party where the mail-order brides danced in bikini tops and a stringer from La Prensa put her foot through one of the African drums. One Saturday, there was an unplanned party because people kept turning up with wine, hoping there might be a party they hadn't heard about. At one presidential debate–watching party, a drunken state assemblyman told Sabine he wanted to leave his wife for her, and when Sabine turned him down, he locked himself in a bathroom and shaved his head.

Kate knew everyone. They knew Kate. Half the men carried a torch for her; women dragged her into bedrooms to tell her secrets. Ben was hers, so he was instantly A-list, included in kitchen powwows and treated to coke and offered jobs at the Jersey City mayor's office. It went to his head. He took sides. He cared. He became a fork-waving shouter at breakfast. He donated twenty-dollar bills and marched and went out knocking on doors in the Bronx. Just being in Sabine's crowd made him feel like a soldier in the good war; he was no longer just Ben for himself, but an invincible Ben for all mankind.

And after all, it was the year 2000—Chen's Year, the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift; a year of mass protests at which the same violin-playing blind girl would always appear and play the same Irish air; the year Les Girafes occupied the embassy of Germany and flew the anarchist flag and the Jolly Roger from its broken windows; that best-ever year when Ben was first in love.

And began to spy utopia. In bars and taquerías, in the inebriate dark of a much-used bed, on the rooftop, above/among the starry opulence of Upper Manhattan, he believed what Kate believed and was always (in his mind) in a wine haze, dancing in a jostling swarm of mailorder brides and political hacks, while the world became the something else of dreams, of books, of Kate.

The Heavens © 2019 by Sandra Newman. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.