The Everlasting
#1624.15 in the official ranking · full ranking
Books 1 book Status Complete 2025 Reading commitment Low Alix E. Harrow Last reviewed 2026-08-19
Overview
Alix E. Harrow's The Everlasting (2025), her third universe in this canon alongside The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches, is a standalone epic time-travel fantasy novel about how stories from the past reshape the future. The novel follows a protagonist who moves across different eras of a single long history, discovering that the myths and folk tales told in each period are themselves a kind of record, and a kind of weapon, carried forward by those who choose to keep retelling them. As in Harrow's earlier work, the book treats storytelling itself as a form of power available especially to people otherwise denied it, and folds a found-family structure into its wider historical sweep. Published in 2025, it continues Harrow's pattern of writing structurally ambitious standalone fantasies rather than open-ended series, each built around a different core conceit -- portal doors, witchcraft and suffrage, and here, the persistence of story across time.
Mythic fantasy · For Adult
Core Canon: Reading Order (1 work) counts toward ranking
The Everlasting (2025) core · 4.15 (84,448 ratings)
Quick answers
- How many books are in The Everlasting? The Everlasting's Core Canon is 1 book.
- Is The Everlasting finished? Complete (2025).
- How much reading does The Everlasting take? Low reading commitment (estimated from 1 Core Canon book · ~320 pages).
- How is The Everlasting ranked? #162 in this site's official ranking, based on 84,448 reader ratings across 1 Core Canon book. See the full ranking for how this is calculated.
Why is it ranked #162?
Ranked #162 in the official ranking.
- Average reader rating of 4.15 across 1 core book.
- A smaller readership (84,448 ratings), so the score carries less weight of numbers.
- 0.05 behind #161, The Wood Wife.
- Below the top-10 average of 4.45.
- A single standalone novel: ranked on that one book alone.
Why explore this universe?
Highly rated · 1 book · Complete · 84k ratings · Ranks #162 overall
Good choice if you want a quick, low-commitment mythic fantasy universe that's already finished, so there's no wait for the next book.
Reading order
A single Core Canon work: no sequencing question to resolve.
Awards (verified)
- Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (Best Fantasy Novel), 2026: won: The Everlasting; Confirmed via File 770's independent report of the 2026 Locus Awards ceremony.
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Suggestions computed from what The Everlasting and each of these worlds have in common on record (subgenre, audience, shape, reading commitment and score), not a documented narrative connection.
- The Master and Margarita Mythic fantasy · Complete · Low commitment · 4.28
- The Wood Wife Mythic fantasy / Urban fantasy · Complete · Low commitment · 4.20
- Till We Have Faces Mythic fantasy · Complete · Low commitment · 4.20
- Kaikeyi Mythic fantasy · Complete · Low commitment · 4.17
Official resources
Research details
Ranking metrics: weighted average 4.15 across 84,448 ratings on 1 Core Canon book. See Why is it ranked here? above for the full breakdown, or the full ranking.
How do we know this?
Admission: Admit The Everlasting (Alix E. Harrow) as Harrow's 3rd universe accepted 2026-08-19
Sources: (see source tier definitions)
Last reviewed: 2026-08-19
Rule: Core Canon = the single published novel (2025).