The Everlasting

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow, opens with a man who has seen too much war. He is a scholar, back from the front, and he makes his living telling the story of a legendary knight, the heroine his country treats as its founding myth.

Then comes the order that changes everything: he has to travel into the past and shadow that knight up close. The plan is to record her deeds as they really happened, without the polish of legend. But the flesh-and-blood woman looks nothing like the statue he has studied his whole life.

The book blends time travel with knightly fantasy and questions the way a nation chooses to tell its own story. Who writes the legend? And what gets lost when a person becomes a symbol? Harrow works through those questions with the careful prose her readers already know, and leaves you as curious as the narrator about what waits on the other side of time.