Meet Travis Smith. He wears a grey jumper with holes in the sleeves, keeps almost nothing in his flat but a folding table and a stack of borrowed photo albums, and feeds a white cat he keeps insisting is not his. He is also Death. Not a scythe or a hooded abstraction, but a quiet man who sits with the dying in their final minutes, cradles their heads, and tells them it is okay now.<\/p>\n
That is the premise of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt<\/em> by Ben Reeves, and within a page or two you sense that the book has little interest in the cosmic theatrics the setup might promise. It wants the small stuff. The stale tea. The unopened birthday cards. The precise moment a lonely old man buys bananas he does not need, just to hear a shopkeeper ask, cash or card.<\/p>\n Reeves sets everything in an unnamed English town that thought itself a city, a place of industrial estates, canals fenced off behind train tracks, and bars that open and close with the seasons. On paper it sounds bleak. On the page it glows. The prose finds the sacred in the discarded: a mattress rotting against a birch, sewage drifting through reeds and somehow all the more precious for its rareness, pigeons treated like street dancers. Travis narrates most of it in a present-tense hush, and his attention is so total that a bus ride or a bath-time squabble carries the same weight as a car crash.<\/p>\n This is where the writing earns its praise. Reeves came up as a painter and a musician, and both show in how he builds a scene, value by value, sound by sound. The style is generous and strange, closer to prose poetry than to conventional storytelling, and it is the main reason Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt<\/em> by Ben Reeves reads unlike almost anything else on the shelf right now.<\/p>\n A warning worth stating plainly: if you come for plot, you may leave restless. \u201cEverything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt\u201d is built as a mosaic of vignettes, each headed with a plain descriptive title such as \u201cA Morning Man\u201d or \u201cA Strong Man,\u201d each following one person Travis attends. Between them, a slender through-line grows: the midwife Dalia and her eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall and refuse to let this odd, solitary man keep his distance.<\/p>\n The pleasure here is cumulative rather than propulsive. Reeves is playing a longer, quieter game than he first lets on, and a thread that seems like a minor refrain turns out to be doing patient, devastating work by the close. To say more would spoil a book whose final movement lands with real force. What I can safely tell you is that the ending reframes everything before it, and it rewards the reader who trusts the drift.<\/p>\n It makes an ordinary life feel enormous. A woman noticing, for twenty unbroken minutes, that she has two children and they are real, becomes one of the most moving passages in recent fiction. The themes are handled with unusual tenderness. Travis and Dalia are mirror images, one ushering lives out, one ushering them in, and Reeves lets that symmetry breathe rather than hammering it. Layla, meanwhile, is that rare thing, a child written without a shred of cuteness or false wisdom, obsessed with clowns and narwhals and a slice of bread going blue in her wardrobe. Through her camera and her questions, the novel argues its central case, that a brick is not boring if you look at it long enough, and neither is a life. It is in passages like these that Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt<\/em> by Ben Reeves is at its most persuasive, coaxing wonder out of the least promising material.<\/p>\n No book earns its warmth for free, and an honest reader will feel the seams.<\/p>\n The vignette form is the novel\u2019s strength and its weakness at once. Read in long sittings, the accumulation of deaths can numb rather than deepen, and a few chapters play a note the book has already sounded. Momentum is diffuse by design, which means the middle stretch occasionally wanders.<\/p>\n There is a sentimental edge that will divide readers. The lyric density runs hot, and the closing address to the reader states the book\u2019s message more plainly than some will want after being trusted to feel it themselves. Where Reeves shows, he is remarkable. Where he tells, a little of the spell thins.<\/p>\n None of this sinks the book. It simply keeps a near-perfect debut from being a flawless one, and readers who prize a driving plot over mood and texture should know what they are choosing.<\/p>\n Context sharpens the achievement. Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is Reeves\u2019s debut, and an early draft won the international 2024 Bath Novel Award before Atlantic Books and Avid Reader Press brought it to print. He lives in Peterborough and, tellingly, works by day as a web designer for a book printing company, which lends a lived-in authenticity to Travis\u2019s habit of restoring old photographs<\/a> and to the recurring image of a life as a book shedding its pages. The title borrows a line from Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s Slaughterhouse-Five<\/em>, and Reeves has said its past tense does deliberate work: it is the sort of thing you can only say looking back, half ironic and half sincere. That doubleness runs through the whole novel.<\/p>\n Readers who fall for Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt<\/em> by Ben Reeves will find kin in a handful of other titles:<\/p>\n The Book Thief<\/em> by Markus Zusak, the obvious companion, with Death again as a tender, elegiac narrator. Grief books are everywhere, and most of them flatter us with tidy catharsis. What makes Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt<\/em> by Ben Reeves stand apart is its refusal to console cheaply and its insistence that the mundane is the miracle. It is a debut of startling assurance, occasionally too fond of its own tenderness, yet so alive to the texture of being here that its small flaws feel almost churlish to raise.<\/p>\n Read it slowly. Read it when you can afford to be undone a little. And when you finish, you may find yourself doing exactly what the book quietly asks, looking up from the page at whoever is in the room, and seeing them properly, maybe for the first time in a while.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meet Travis Smith. He wears a grey jumper with holes in the sleeves, keeps almost nothing in his flat but a folding table and a stack of borrowed photo albums, and feeds a white cat he keeps insisting is not his. He is also Death. Not a scythe or a hooded abstraction, but a quiet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A grey town rendered in silver<\/h2>\n
The shape of the story<\/h2>\n
What the book does beautifully<\/h3>\n
\nIt refuses easy comfort. Travis never changes a fate, and the book never pretends grief resolves neatly.
\nIt threads dark humour through the sorrow, from a manager desperate for the toilet in a budget meeting to a retired strongman weeping in his unused Lamborghini.
\nIts nature interludes, a fawn, a snail, a pond of mayflies waiting for one glorious day, quietly rhyme with the human chapters without ever spelling out the link.<\/p>\nWhere the light gets in<\/h2>\n
What does not quite land<\/h2>\n
On the structure<\/h4>\n
A note on tone<\/h5>\n
The hand behind the curtain<\/h2>\n
If this moved you, read these next<\/h2>\n
\nThe Humans<\/em> by Matt Haig, for an outsider learning, cell by cell, what makes a human life worth staying for.
\nA Man Called Ove<\/em> by Fredrik Backman, a named comparison for good reason, all grief and grumbling and unexpected community.
\nLincoln in the Bardo<\/em><\/a> by George Saunders, if the chorus-of-the-dead structure and formal daring appeal to you.
\nPiranesi<\/em><\/a> by Susanna Clarke, for a similarly gentle, uncanny quiet and a narrator estranged from the ordinary world.
\nThe Lovely Bones<\/em> by Alice Sebold, for a loss that quietly reorganises an entire family from the far side of death.<\/p>\nA verdict without a number<\/h2>\n