An ambitious, knotty novel that aims for mythic scale and mostly earns it, even when it slightly overreaches.
The Everlasting sits well outside my usual reading territory. Time travel crossed with secondary-world fantasy is not, on paper, my thing. And yet I found myself thoroughly engaged by this book, impressed by its undertaking and absorbed by its ideas, even as I remained unconvinced by its central love story. The result is a novel I admired more than I loved, but one I’m very glad I read.
Plot in a Nutshell
Sir Una Everlasting is Dominion’s foundational hero: an orphan who pulled a sword from a tree, served her queen, united or perhaps more accurately, colonised, vast territories, and died in service of crown and country. Her story survives as legend, propaganda, and children’s tales, while her lived reality has been sanded smooth to benefit others.
Centuries later, Owen Mallory, a returned soldier turned struggling historian, becomes obsessed with Una’s story. That obsession pulls him into the archives, into war, and eventually into the past itself. Una and Owen find themselves bound together across time, trapped in a cycle of retelling a story that always ends the same way, unless they can change it, and accept the personal cost of doing so.
Thoughts
The set-up is immediately compelling and knowingly Arthurian: a girl, a sword, a vow of loyalty to a queen. Harrow leans into the familiarity, using it as scaffolding rather than destination.
At its strongest, The Everlasting is a clear-eyed examination of narrative power. History here is not truth but construction: “accidents piled on top of mistakes,” shaped into story only once someone with authority decides how it should be told. Dominion’s national myth is revealed as something actively manufactured, less concerned with accuracy than with usefulness. The question is who benefits. The book is particularly sharp on how nationalism feeds on repetition, the drumbeat of a story told often enough that it stops being questioned.
Closely tied to this is Harrow’s exploration of power itself. Power is shown as addictive, self-justifying, and profoundly fearful of loss. Queens and generals are not monsters so much as people who have decided that their grip on authority matters more than the bodies beneath it. The novel occasionally presses this theme a little hard, but the writing is strong enough that it rarely tips into lecturing.
Memory is the quieter balance: who we are when stripped of story, and how much of ourselves survives repetition and distortion. Una’s struggle is not only against fate but against being turned into symbol rather than person. Owen’s, meanwhile, is bound up with inheritance — his lightly sketched father, whom I found quietly moving, stands as a reminder that resisting power is possible, but always comes at a cost.
Where the book faltered for me was in its framing as a great love story across the ages. Owen’s fascination with Una feels immediate and intense, but it often reads as infatuation, initially with her legend and ultimately with the idea of changing her ending rather than a love that deepens through shared experience. Una’s commitment to Owen, while clearly intended to be reciprocal, never quite convinced me on the page. The relationship feels inevitable rather than earned, driven by narrative necessity more than emotional threads weaved together.
The gender politics elsewhere are thoughtfully handled. I appreciated Una as a woman knight whose strength is neither novelty nor gimmick, and the contrast between her steadiness and Owen’s self-confessed cowardice is effective. The queen, too, is compelling in her naked hunger for power, feared, capable, and ultimately fragile. As the novel puts it, “a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.” That tension between legitimacy and precarity runs through the book. There is also a strong theme of othering, Owen looks different and is treated differently but it does not overwhelm and feels sensitively handled.
The novel sometimes strains under the weight of its ambitions. There are a lot of themes here, story, power, memory, bravery, cowardice, gender, empire, and they come thick and fast. The author however paints a compelling world and the language is light and thoughtful making it an enjoyable read.