Credit...Michela Buttignol

A Stunning Romance Novel Suffused With Yearning

Our columnist read “The Everlasting” too late to put it on her Best of 2025 list. She’s sorry!

Olivia Waite

Olivia Waite is the Book Review’s romance fiction columnist. She writes queer historical romance, fantasy and critical essays on the genre’s history and future.

• Jan. 21, 2026

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The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

There’s something especially bitter about mistakes you make in January. The new year should be a fresh snowfall, unmarred by mud, grit or the treachery of ice. And yet on the first day of 2026, I realized that **THE EVERLASTING (Tor, 311 pp., $29.99) **— a late 2025 book I had saved to read over the break — belonged on last year’s best romance list. I sincerely regret the error.

Arthuriana is hot again, and like Tasha Suri’s exquisite “Isle in the Silver Sea,” Harrow’s novel is set in a fantasy realm where stories are at the center of power. Owen Mallory is a soldier turned scholar researching the legendary knight Sir Una Everlasting, whose feats of war and conquest put Dominion’s first great queen on the throne. One day someone sends him an ancient book — “bound in rich red heartwood, cut against the grain so that the rings of the tree were visible, rippling outward” — called “The Death of Una Everlasting.”

Owen is studying the book when, one day, it disappears, and in its place is simply a card with an address. Following this clue, Owen ends up under a yew tree, hundreds of years in the past, with the point of Sir Una’s sword at his throat as she demands to know how he found her.

Owen’s already half in love with the loyal, brutal warrior — but he also knows that her death is close at hand, and understands that it will be his role to write the official account of it. To say too much about what follows would be to spoil a truly glorious romance, cutting as a blade and aching with near-hopeless yearning. How can Una ever atone for the amount of innocent blood she’s spilled at her pitiless queen’s command? How brave can Owen be when he realizes just how much he stands to lose?

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Dom-Com

by Adriana Anders

For comic mishaps rather than tragic ones, we turn to DOM-COM (Forever, 416 pp., paperback, $18.99), which is — you guessed it — a rom-com about a B.D.S.M. dom. Rae Jensen is a human resources officer in a tech start-up who has finally worked up the courage to walk into a kink club and look for a dominant to fulfill all her submissive fantasies. She meets a man they call the General, and the gentle first-time scene they play together is the hottest thing Rae’s ever done.

To Rae’s horror, she walks into work the next morning to find that the General is also Grant Bowman, her company’s new consultant — and they’ll be sharing an office.

Grant has been hired to find the source of a data leak before an important investor meeting. But now he’s crammed into a tiny space with an alluringly bratty sub, and his usual stern control is fraying badly. What follows is a gasp-worthy series of terrible but terribly hot decisions: sex in the employee lounge kitchen, tying Rae to her office chair, kink-inflected arguments about rules and behavior. It’s the kind of dishy drama that keeps people reading advice columns like Ask a Manager, and it pairs beautifully with Anders’s skill for high emotional stakes and layered character work. Recommended, but maybe don’t tell H.R.

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Skate It Till You Make It

by Rufaro Faith Mazarura

Finally, with hockey romance at new heights and the Winter Olympics coming up, we have the thoughtful, satisfying SKATE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT (Flatiron, 376 pp., paperback, $19.99).

Drew and Ari meet on a rooftop at a New Year’s Eve bash in London. They’re both looking for an escape from the party — and from past relationships and stressful family situations. Thinking they’ll never see one another again, they feel free to confess their worst flaws before going their separate ways. And then they both end up at the Olympic Village in St. Moritz.

Drew, who dropped out of his college photography program, has lucked into an Olympics gig with a major sponsor he can’t afford to disappoint. Ari is the captain of Britain’s struggling women’s ice hockey team, the underdog nobody expects to win any matches. She’s also trying to prove to her gold-medal-winning ex-boyfriend that their latest breakup is permanent. What better way to convince him than by pretending she’s dating someone else?

Of course Drew and Ari’s fake relationship turns real despite their protestations. What’s surprising — and profoundly delightful — is how this romance takes its time and builds out not just our couple’s connection, but the secondary relationships, too: Drew’s hypercompetitive hockey star sister, who bears a grudge against Ari for an injury years ago; Ari’s teammates and best friends.

The result is less about two people finding their forever ending, and more about two people freeing themselves to start something fresh and promising. And isn’t that what we all long to read in the new year?

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