Lisa Deborah – 5 stars
Roz Morris’s Ever Rest is that rare novel that earns every comparison it invites. It has the emotional acuity of Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward, the immersive world-building of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six, and the haunting sense of wilderness as both refuge and threat found in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. But Morris synthesizes these influences into something wholly her own: a quiet, devastating, and surprisingly tender exploration of what happens to those left behind when a catastrophe freezes time.
The premise is immediately gripping. Twenty years ago, Hugo and Ash were on top of the world. As the acclaimed rock band Ashbirds, they were poised for superstardom. Then Ash went missing, lost in a mountaineering accident, and the lives of everyone around him were changed forever. Irrepressible, infuriating, mesmerizing Ash left a hole that could never be filled.
Two decades later, Ash’s fiancée Elza is still struggling to move on. Her private grief is constantly outshone by the glare of publicity, Ash’s legend has only grown in death, making her a perpetual figure of public fascination and pity. Hugo, once Ash’s musical partner and closest friend, has become a recluse in Nepal, shunning his old life while living in the shadow of the mountains that took his bandmate. Robert, an ambitious session player whose brief time with Ashbirds was supposed to be his launching pad, finds himself unable to achieve recognition in his own right, forever defined by his proximity to greatness he did not create.
What distinguishes Ever Rest from other novels about catastrophic loss is its temporal sophistication. Morris moves fluidly between the band’s intense, electric early days and the muted, haunted present. The Ashbirds sequences are rendered with such vividness that you can almost hear the music, a considerable achievement in prose. But the novel’s true subject is not the lost glory but its aftermath: the strange purgatory of being famous for having known someone famous, of being frozen as the young woman who lost her fiancé or the bandmate who failed to save his friend.
Morris writes with a musician’s ear for rhythm and a mountaineer’s understanding of the seductive danger of extremes. The prose is lyrical without being precious, the pacing deliberate without being slow. She is particularly skilled at rendering the interior lives of characters who have spent two decades perfecting the art of not moving on, and the gradual, painful, hopeful process of deciding to rejoin the living.
For readers who love novels about music, about grief, about the strange afterlives of those touched by fame, Ever Rest is a gift. It asks hard questions about how we honor the dead without becoming dead ourselves, and it answers those questions with honesty, compassion, and a hard-won sense of hope.
Highly recommended.
Roz Morris, author 