Heaven

by Chad Taylor

"You gamble, you believe in luck. Like if you're swimming, you believe in water. Right?"

Robert Marling is on a losing streak. He's a struggling architect with a gambling problem, and a wife who is suing him for divorce. When he meets Heaven, a transexual streetwalker who glimpses the future in her dreams, his luck begins to change -- for better, and for worse.

A tale of chance and weirdness on Auckland's K Road, HEAVEN was made into a feature film by Miramax in 1998 starring Martin Donovan. This new edition of Chad Taylor's original novel has been updated and revised, with new original cover art by Jonathan King exclusive to the ebook edition.

209 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Chad Taylor is the author of the novels Blue Hotel, Departure Lounge, Electric, Shirker, Heaven, Pack of Lies and The Church of John Coltrane. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship. Heaven was made as a feature film and his novels and stories are in translation. He wrote the movie Realiti which was selected for Fantastic Fest. Blue Hotel was a finalist for Best Novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Reviews

[Bruce Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A transvestite called Heaven who is plagued by precognitive dreams and hir relationship with a gambler who wants to cash in this affliction is the gist of this story. Dream and 'reality' merge in places like a strip-club called Paradise, or the office of a compulsive scribbler psychiatrist. It is, to take a line from the book, about "People on the edge who don’t know they’re on the edge." Unfortunately, what it is not about is Auckland, where it is set, or more specifically, K-Road, a street notorious in puritan New Zealand as a red-light district.
Because of the use, or overuse, of dream, the reader is left confused. As the old saying goes, one is not sure if they are Arthur or Martha.