Review: 'The Everlasting' by Alix E. Harrow

I finally got around to reading The Everlasting and then immediately pressed it into someone else's hands all like "read this now!". It's therefore fair to say I absolutely adored this book and it will undoubtedly be amongst my favourite reads of the year. Thanks to my dad who bought me this book for Christmas last year in exchange for eternal gratitude and devotion (jk!).

Pub. Date: October 2025
Publisher: Tor Books

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.

Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.

But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story--they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

I am a medievalist, specifically I am someone who works with medieval literature and that means I am deeply attuned to how stories from the past impact the present. Many medieval works were foundational to the period of nation-building during the 19th and 20th centuries, as countries started looking for their "own" history and identity. To do so, they reached back to the Middle Ages, be it Das Nibelungenlied for Germany, El Cid for Spain, Le Chanson de Roland for France, or Beowulf for England. Of course there are other texts as well, but what all these texts share is a hero, a fighter, a warrior or knight, whose bravery and heroism comes to stand in for the spirit of a nation. We saw the horrible consequences this can have in how the Nibelungen material and associated Old Norse mythology was used by the Third Reich during World War II. It can also be beautiful, however, this reaching back and connecting to something older, creating a continuity between yourself and what has come before, thereby preparing the ground for what is to come. I bring all of that to reading The Everlasting and therefore I am quite comfortable in saying I might be its ideal reader. Give me a tragic knight, especially if that knight is a woman, give me legends and tales, give me historians and literary scholars tracing stories, and give me a love that will make me choke up.

Owen Mallory is a scholar who has the best day and the worst day of his life when a mysterious book is delivered to him which seems to be a legitimate contemporary telling of Sir Una Everlasting's life and death, centuries ago. Sir Una is foundational to the country of Dominion and Owen has spent his life dedicated to her, following propaganda posters of her into war before ending up studying her stories at university. Getting the book should be the best thing ever, except it is not just a book and Owen finds himself in the past, following Sir Una as she follows the path laid out for her. As the blurb reveals, Owen and Una will walk this path again and again, her story will be told and retold, and as Alix E. Harrow weaves this web, we will not only come to understand who Una and Owen really are, but also what the power of storytelling is. I adored Una, who I fully imagined as Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth, and while I miss reading about her I am also very pleased for her that her story is her own now. I initially needed some time to get onboard with Owen. Perhaps, as an academic, I felt called out, who knows. (Harrow used to be an academic as well I believe, so maybe that's why it hits home.) As we revisit their story, however, I became very fond of them both and evermore intrigued by the world they were building. While most of The Everlasting, I would say, is told through Owen's perspective, Una also gets to tell the story and I loved how they seemed to communicate with one another through their stories. (Perhaps I should finally read This Is How You Lose the Time War...)

I heard about this book from Cari Can Read on YouTube, who had read Harrow's short story 'The Six Deaths of the Saint' and then dove into The Everlasting. While not the same, from what I can tell, the short story and novel share a similar impulse and I can imagine that in its brevity, the short story packs a different kind of punch than the novel. I haven't read the short story (yet) but I do wholeheartedly love this book. It is my literal job to compare narratives, track patterns of scattered details across stories, and trace the influence of legends through centuries, so of course I was going to enjoy this in my spare time as well. For some readers it might need some getting used to to revisit the same storyline multiple times, but the beauty really is in the details, in the things that change and stay the same. The Everlasting's approach to time travel also worked for me. With Owen going back centuries to literally write the story of what happened, these small changes have a big impact and continuity and time become suspect in and of themselves. Time travel cannot be neat, in my opinion, it is too complex of a thought to make complete sense and books that attempt to make it all fit often don't work for me. By using that complexity for her story, I think Harrow finds a good way through the timey-wimey-ness of it all. This was my first time actually reading Alix E. Harrow, but since I also have The Once and Future Witches waiting on my literal bookshelf, I will be reading more of her very soon.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

The Everlasting is a beautiful book about the power of stories and the power of love duking it out. Una Everlasting is my favourite knight, Owen is an academic truly going above and beyond for the research, and I am a devoted new fan of Alix E. Harrow.