The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow is a master of building multilayered worlds, and that skill is on full display in her latest novel, The Everlasting. It’s a tale of time-travel, love, ambition, and memory, one where the ending is never really the end.

Owen Mallory has spent his whole life obsessed with the legend of Una Everlasting, to the point that he’s dedicated his scholarly work to it. Then he gets an opportunity to go 900 years into the past to make sure Una is able to fulfill her final quest… even though she’ll die at the end. They begin to fall in love, but the legend must play out correctly. But Owen is sent back again and again, the sequence of events slightly different each time, as an ambitious woman keeps tweaking the story to suit her lust for power. Can Una and Own ever escape this time loop of sacrifice and betrayal? Or can they finally rewrite the story and have a happily ever after at long last?

What I Liked:

• Owen and Una are speaking to each other, telling the story to each other so they remember. They take turns telling it, offering up their own version of events, and we readers are simply along for the ride. This is their complicated, heart-wrenching, triumphant love story through the centuries.
• The power of storytelling. Una’s mission isn’t simply to slay a dragon; she’s the legend who will impact this territory for the next thousand years. Her story literally serves to build up a queen and an empire. Every story needs a hero, a villain, and perhaps a tragic ending to inspire lasting sympathy.
• The circular nature of time-travel. What happened first? How many times have they gone back, lived, died? Una and Owen experience intense déjà vu as they repeat the same steps, endlessly rewriting the legend. The body remembers even if the mind doesn’t… and eventually, the mind will, too. That memory and their love for each other will be the only thing that can save them from an eternity of torment.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

• It kind of got to be too much for my brain by the end. It can feel repetitive and vaguely confusing… but that’s how it was for our characters too, so I suspect this was intentional.

Audiobook:

Sid Sagar and Moira Quirk narrate as Owen and Una, respectively. Both do an excellent job of portraying their characters and capturing the subtly evolving tone of the story. I love how they trade off in telling the story, too.

Final Thoughts

The Everlasting is a superb feat of storytelling, about the power of stories and legends, how ambition can destroy, and how love can overcome again and again. It’s a complex novel that’s best enjoyed at a slower pace to savor the nuances. Alix E. Harrow has proven, once again, that’s she’s among the best fantasy writers of our time.

Special thanks to Tor Publishing Group, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy The Everlasting here – it’s available as a hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
Audiobook Narrator	Sid Sagar and Moira Quirk
Audience	Adult
Genre	Fantasy
Number of Pages	320
Format I Read	Audiobook & Ebook (NetGalley ARCs)
Original Publication Date	October 28, 2025
Publisher	Tor Books

Official Summary

DELUXE EDITION—a beautiful hardcover edition featuring dark teal sprayed edges, a foil stamp on the casing, and full-page illustrations!

From Alix E. Harrow, the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, comes a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part–even if it breaks his heart.

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.

“Alix E. Harrow is an exceptional, undeniable talent.” —Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

“An utter masterpiece… I loved every single page.” —Rachel Gillig, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of One Dark Window