The Everlasting

 The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, 320 pages.

Owen Mallory has been obsessed with Sir Una Everlasting, hero of Dominion and part of the nation's foundational legends, since he was a child. It was her face that sent him to war, and her story that drove him to study history. But when he is sent through time to preserve Dominion's history, he learns that the woman is not so simple as the legend. Una is a broken woman; her decades at war have left her scarred inside and out, and she wants nothing more than to abandon the story she is trapped in. Instead they must live out the end of her life: her final quest, a great betrayal, her noble death, again and again. Finding a different ending means breaking her myth, so they both have to decide what is more important: the woman or what she represents.

I liked this book so much it's hard to talk coherently about it. This book is doing so much at once, and it's doing it with balance, grace, and beautiful prose. This is partially a love story about knowing someone on a bone-deep level built through an uncountable amount of time. It's also a tragedy. It's also a scathing critique about how fascism needs to rewrite history to justify its own existence. I cried at the end and haven't stopped thinking of them since. I do believe this is my best book of the year.