Science Fiction Book Review Podcast · Luke Burrage

SFBRP #580 – Alix E Harrow – The Everlasting

January 28, 2026·1 hr 11 min·2 clips

A man falls in love with the fictional version of a woman he himself created for propaganda purposes.

It opens sideways. It moves through childhood reading memories, British and Scottish references, and the way those books drag colonialism and racism into the conversation whether anyone planned on it or not. Then it narrows. The discussion settles on the Harrow novel and starts testing it as a romance and a time-loop story at the same time. The hosts are wary. One of them keeps circling the idea that the relationship at the center feels less like mutual love and more like a hard-to-pin-down fantasy object. The book gets compared. The conversation reaches for other time-travel romances and lands on This Is How You Lose the Time War as the obvious reference point. The structure becomes the problem. They keep returning to the second-person narration, the memory resets, and the question of when, exactly, the story being told could even have been written. The episode does not rush. It spends real time unpacking the first stretch of the loop, the break when that loop stops, and the shift into Una's point of view. A creepier edge keeps surfacing. The discussion treats the age and desire dynamics as uncomfortable enough to register, even when the book is trying to sell them as yearning. That word gets pressure-tested. They keep asking what readers mean when they praise yearning, and whether that feeling survives once the premise is stripped of its romance haze. The banter stays loose. The hosts move from speculation to correction to self-correction without pretending the book is simpler than it is. By the end, the verdict is unsettled. The episode leaves the Harrow novel looking like a book that is trying hard to be clever about desire and time, while also making the listener work to decide whether the machinery pays off.

As heard by us

A skeptical look at a time-loop romance that keeps testing its own logic.

The piece stays most convincing when it zeroes in on the book's time-loop romance, the second-person narration, and the strain that repeated resets place on yearning.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A skeptical pass on a creepy time-loop romance that keeps asking what yearning really means.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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