Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves: A Book Review

Travis is not like us. He is everywhere and nowhere, present at the moment a life ends and then gone, cycling through the days with detachment. But he is also deeply, uncomplicatedly human. I need to sit for a moment after this book and take in its message while dabbing my tears. 

Synopsis

Travis is Death. Over the course of 290 pages, he moves through a series of lives, witnessing ordinary moments that are beautiful and out of his personal reach. We see the textures of everyday existence through Travis’s eyes, and this book had me crying by page 90.

My review

Ben Reeves spent more than twenty years writing before publishing this book. Reeves, a web designer, painter, and musician by trade, reportedly writes by walking and composing passages aloud as he moves through the world. It shows. The landscape in this book breathes. The outside world is rendered with stunning vividness.

The title comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Vonnegut, Reeves is interested in what it means to be briefly alive. Our MMC, Travis, finds everything beautiful. A conversation at a bus stop. A family watching TV. He knows how short life is.

What struck me most reading this book was a concept I kept returning to: sonder. That sudden awareness that every passing stranger is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Travis carries this feeling as a permanent condition. He knows everything about everyone, and he finds it beautiful. Every person is an iceberg; you see so little of what makes up a person.

This book also reminded me of The Five People You Meet in Heaven: the idea that every life intersects with others in ways we never fully understand, and that those intersections may impact us in ways we’ll never know.

It shifts POV: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, but that didn’t bother me. The present tense maintains that sense of immediacy, of being in the moment even as Travis witnesses endings. There are no dialogue tags, a choice that calls to mind Sally Rooney, and which I found I didn’t miss at all. It often felt like a stream of consciousness coming from the writer.

The novel was awarded the Bath Novel Award in 2024, and a film adaptation directed by Marc Turtletaub was announced in August 2026. Although I can imagine this not translating well to a screen because there is a lot of internal thought within the narration.

The book closes with mayflies. Creatures that live for a single day, born knowing that the window is brief, and living all of it as much as they can. Travis, too, changes and cycles; his body shifts, and in some sense he becomes someone else, while remaining the messenger he is. He remains Death, and he remains in awe.

The book tells us: we are all mayflies. And all we have is a short moment to live.

What I liked/What I didn’t

What I liked

The prose.

The concept.

And how, for a book about death, it is remarkably full of life.

What I didn’t

There were occasional vignettes where I felt the material thinning slightly. I thought it could be tightened and trimmed a little. But these are minor dips in what is otherwise a consistently impressive debut.

Favourite Quotes

Page 12

An old man drops his wallet on the pavement, but I don’t want to scare him by snatching it, so I let him bend over and pick it up himself. He struggles. I wonder if he preferred it that way, grabbing it himself, or if he wishes I’d helped and thinks the world is going to hell. There’s a lost teddy on a stone wall.

Page 20

It’s not that she can’t live without him, she just never wanted to. She lived a life with the man she chose and now she’s in a new phase, a superfluous phase, where his voice doesn’t exist, where his smell doesn’t exist. They arrived on this planet separately. They found one another. They spent more years together than apart. And when he left her alone, she was halved, and now she’s ready to become no person at all.

Page 21

she learnt long ago, there’s no life better than a life shared. To fully give it, and take it, until one isn’t complete without the other. They never told her that.

Page 90

She tells me stories of her strangest deliveries, and I try to fix my attention only on her. Not Lynn, in the flat below. Not the fox in the car park, nosing beneath the van. Not all the voices, everywhere — just Dalia, here, now.

Page 288

A frothy sky spits over the allotment, but it’s not cold. The water has woken the scents of soil and leaves, of slugs and caterpillars. I sit on my camping stool watching my garden tremble from the droplets falling on it, and from the breeze through the gates. A faint hiss of rain masks the sounds of traffic and birds, until all that remains is a comforting tinnitus, everywhere.

Page 288

We are here to dance, to meet, and then we’re gone. We have no mouths from which to eat — we were never meant to last. We are here for this one sacred moment. That’s all it ever was.

Page 290

A Twenty-Minute Gift

Imagine for one moment that you’re in the future. Your future. These are your last moments before death. You’re in your own bed, surrounded by flowers and cards and people you love. And there, in the corner of the room, like a shadow, is where you finally meet me. Now, imagine I give you a final gift. You’re allowed to go back. Just for twenty minutes, you’re allowed to go back to the exact moment where you’re reading these words — you’re back. Here you are.

This is your twenty-minute gift. Do not waste it. You can’t change your life in twenty minutes, so don’t try. No — do the thing that you’ll wish, on your deathbed, you could have done one last time. Something precious. Kiss your partner. Play with your children. Wander in the world.

You have nineteen minutes remaining.

Final verdict

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a debut that warns you to pay attention to the small things, which is really just another way of asking you to pay attention to everything. Four stars, and a book I borrowed but wish I owned.

If you are the kind of reader who values prose over plot, who wants to be moved rather than propelled, this is for you. I read it in 2 days and thought about it for longer.

Where can I read it?