Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

By Ben Reeves

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A gorgeous reminder of what really matters. Prepare to be astounded." --People - "One of the best, most moving books I have read in years." --Scott Detrow, NPR - "This is one of the most affecting, original, and unforgettable novels I have ever read." --Sarah Damoff, author of The Bright Years

For fans of Fredrik Backman and Virginia Evans, an astonishing novel about finding beauty in the brevity of life, as narrated by the one who knows it best: Death.

Travis is Death in the modern world. He lives with his cat in a small, gray town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life, which he does without complaint or judgement. He's stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite who he is, but he never tries to change anyone's fate. He is responsible for maintaining the balance of nature, and every life must eventually end.

Then Travis meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall, and despite his best attempts to keep his distance, he finds himself wholeheartedly embraced by other people for the first time. So it is with this seemingly unremarkable family that Travis begins to understand what it means to be truly alive--and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless and ultimately uplifting story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe--especially when it feels most impossible--that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried about time's passing.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1668216361
• ISBN13: 9781668216361
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Everything WAS beautiful

Absolutely beautiful! I wish I could erase this from my memory and read it again. It was so amazing ❤️

It was very beautiful, but it definitely hurt.

Wow! A new favorite book of mine, and I’ve bought three copies for friends and family now too. I finished it and picked it right back up to restart it just to capture the feeling again. In it, Death is portrayed as kind, understanding, gentle, non-judgmental, and timeless. His name is Travis. Honestly, he’s everything you’d hope death to be. He’s even a lovely neighbor to Dalia and her daughters, with whom he bonds throughout the course of the story. Their unusual mishmash of a family traverses difficult experiences and the aforementioned beautiful ones together. Along the way, we meet some of the people Death must claim along the way in the course of his usual duties. Their stories are poignant, heart wrenching, and somehow simultaneously inspiring. Their paths weave and clash together, leaving the reader’s heart in their throat and a contradictory chuckle building in their belly. Some of the most exquisite writing I’ve ever read, and masterful in its ability to elicit emotion. The story is stunning but the literature is its own achievement; it’s everything this story deserved. Ben Reeves pairs stellar storytelling with poetry that makes the mundane spectacular, the beautiful saddening, and the dark comforting, and gave us a novel every bit as quotable as the book it was named from (Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”. For the love of everything, DO NOT read this in public unless you’re comfortable with public displays of emotion, because the waterworks are unavoidable.

A slow, dark journey with a powerful final message

This was a challenging read for me to get through. For the majority of the book, the pacing felt quite slow, and the tone was unrelentingly dark, which made it difficult to fully engage with the narrative or feel truly pulled in by the writing style. It isn't a book I would personally run out and recommend to a broad audience, as it requires a very specific mood and a lot of patience to get to the heart of the story. However, I am glad I stuck with it until the final page. By the end, I was genuinely moved, and the emotional payoff made the entire experience worth it. The book offers a beautiful, necessary reminder to take nothing for granted, to slow down in our daily lives, and to live with intentionality so that we avoid deathbed regrets. While the prose itself wasn't quite my style, the core message hit home in a profound way. It’s a solid three-star read for those who find themselves drawn to this kind of reflective, introspective subject matter.