The Heavens

Ben and Kate meet and fall in love at a party in New York City at the turn of the current millennium, in what seems like our world but slightly altered for the better—more affluent, hopeful, and under the leadership of an environmentally friendly female president. Kate, who has dreamed since childhood about being a different person asleep in an alternate reality, begins to awaken in this dreamscape, in which she is a noblewoman in Elizabethan England, friend and then lover of a little-known poet named William Shakespeare. Somehow these dream escapades, fully realized and corporeal, start affecting her daytime existence, and she wakes up every day in a slightly worse iteration of the world, in which her "false" memories of concurrent realities deem her insane. Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) neatly manages the uneasy feat of pulling off a historical novel featuring both William Shakespeare and Alexander the Great, foreshadowing the action with philosophical musings on the butterfly effect and the Great Man theory of history.