TandeWrites

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned young girl who became a knight and 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, they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

Content warnings include violence and injury, child death, death of a parent, off-page animal death, pregnancy and childbirth, war, and sexual content.

The Everlasting is 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. It’s also a novel-length companion to Harrow’s short story The Six Deaths of the Saint, which I fell in love with earlier in the year and was so excited to learn she expanded the idea into something more than 30 pages.

This one hurt, as do any stories about stories for me. There’s something about the cyclical nature of being thrown around in time to watch the making of a legend by virtue of her unmaking. This story doesn’t just tell a legend—it dissects it, rewrites it, and dares to ask what key elements go missing in the stories we love. I loved the way Harrow constructed this narrative surrounding legends and idols and how those stories are shaped. She approached the idea from the angle of how myths shape the world over time, leaning into the idea that history is written by the victor. It’s about the flow of time and what happens when you disrupt or try to take power over the narrative of history.

And I love the craft of this book, the twists and turns, the layers of each character being revealed alongside each story within the story. There’s a very intimate exploration of what happens when you unveil the humanity behind a legend, as well as what happens when loyalty to an idea becomes so deep it rots you from within. There are emotional parallels between the narrators in both their words and actions, and this took my breath away a little. The story is told as if the characters are narrating their stories to each other and taking over the tale when it gets too much for the other to bear, so it reads as an incredibly intimate conversation between two lovers.

They’re deep and complex characters whose experiences feed into the novel’s grim atmosphere, and their collective suffering feels personal from the first page. But there are also moments of lightness and humour between them that add a balanced (and sometimes well-needed) spark of joy to the story. And I don’t think I can talk about the characters for too long without mentioning that they exhibit the most memorable and breathtaking case of yearning between two fictional people I have ever encountered.

One very niche reason this book appeals to me so deeply is that it reminds me of the Hadestown musical, the industrial revolution retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice that is doomed to be told over and over again. First, it was the quote “Wait for me”, which means nothing on its own, but then there was a “Wait for me, I’m coming” a few pages later, which again means nothing unless you are simultaneously connecting both the dots and nothing. Those quote references alongside specific wording a character used to describe the story being told in a loop made me feel like my worlds were colliding and that this book was written for me. It was this personal link to Hadestown that closed up my throat and made me shed a tear more than anything else.

The Everlasting feels like a fairytale, like folklore, and it’s one of my favourite reads of the year. It’s melancholic and romantic, funny at times, unflinching in challenging gender norms, and full of yearning and observations about the world that apply to both fantasy and the world we live in. At the end of it all, this book is about love. Enduring and everlasting love.