Laura Steven explores the intertwined and recurring lives of two people in her new YA fantasy novel

“What if a girl who can remember that she was murdered in a past life wants revenge in this one?” This single line from Laura Steven’s writing journal in 2017 was the idea that sparked Our Infinite Fates, her new YA novel which will be published by Penguin in February 2025. “I knew it was really compelling, that it was a really strong pitch,” Steven tells me over video call, but for a long time she struggled to find her way into the story. Different genres, including murder mystery and high fantasy, failed to stick. Then, in 2020, Taylor Swift released her Folklore album, featuring the song “Exile”, and the lyric: “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.”

Everything clicked into place. “I wanted to write a book that felt like that,” she recalls. What if that girl couldn’t remember just one past life, but all of her past lives—and they all seemed to end the same way? Like “Exile”, it would also be a love story: “They’re in love and they have been in love for a very long time.”

Our Infinite Fates follows Evelyn, a girl who can remember all of her past lives, including the fact that she has been murdered before her 18th birthday in every single one. In this current life, she goes by the name of Branwen Blythe and is determined to stay alive long enough to donate bone marrow to her sister. There is just the small matter of tracking down Arden, her centuries-old enemy, breaking the curse and trying not to fall in love with them—again.

The story spans a millennium, from 1006 to 2054. “I knew I wanted it to be very epic in scope,” Steven explains. “If they’ve been alive for a thousand years I want to show that!” A modern day storyline in Wales moves forward, interspersed with flashbacks to Evelyn and Arden’s past lives, travelling backwards through history until we reach the point where we learn why this is happening. Steven wrote the past lives first to better understand her characters and the nuances of their relationship: “How can I write this modern day relationship convincingly if I don’t feel that I’ve been through all that with them?” This offered rich scope to her as a writer, creating settings as diverse as the Ottoman Empire of the 1490s, a Vermont asylum in the 1860s and the trenches of the First World War, and was her favourite part to write: “I loved the research.”

As the characters are reborn into different bodies in each life, Steven faced the daunting prospect of capturing the essence of their souls. “Are you the same no matter where you are born?” she muses. “How would the culture and time period you are born into influence you? If you are changing, how can you still be in love, again and again?” The gender of each character is also fluid between lives, sometimes a boy and a girl, other times two boys or two girls. ‘That’s the way I’ve always experienced love,” reveals Steven. “I would fall in love with the person, not the way they look or their gender, but who they are.” The characters may change but they each have elements which remain fundamental to them, like Evelyn’s selflessness and Arden’s love of poetry.

What I wanted to explore was how it would feel to have lived for a thousand years and to have lost everyone you have ever loved and how you would cope with that

Her biggest challenge, however, was how to make Arden intriguing and sympathetic. “He’s a very closed off, stoic construct of a character,” Steven tells me. “Even though he is routinely killing the main character, I still want the reader to be compelled by him, to understand why he does what he does.” A notebook of his poetry, written in one life, and published and read in others, became “a sneaky side door into his psyche”. The narrative builds towards a momentous twist. “As soon as I figured the reason they have to keep killing each other I gasped in public,” Steven gleefully admits. “I needed to have a moment towards the end of the book where we learn that with Evelyn because I think it will actually smack readers around the face!”

Although sweepingly romantic, the book is as much about loss as love. Steven was writing in the shadow of acute postpartum anxiety, overwhelmed by the idea of something terrible happening to her child. “What I wanted to explore was how it would feel to have lived for a thousand years and to have lost everyone you have ever loved and how you would cope with that.” Evelyn loves regardless: “The pain, the loss, is the price of love, but you should still pay it anyway. To do otherwise is miserable.” Arden, on the other hand, completely closes himself off. Steven plays with this contrast and how it leads to them routinely clashing because they just cannot understand each other. “It was very cathartic for me to write,” she confesses, “to process those feelings.”

After years of being a published author and journalist, with multiple YA and middle-grade books to her name, 2025 is set to be a huge breakthrough year for Steven. The six-figure deal for Our Infinite Fates was followed by another, for her adult fantasy novel Silvercloak, which will be published next autumn by Del Rey in the UK and US. Set in a world where magic is fuelled by pleasure and pain, a jaded detective is tasked with going undercover to bring down a criminal organisation but falls in love with the kingpin’s son.

Although the crossover between YA and adult fantasy is often blurred, Steven followed her agent’s advice to make Silvercloak “darker, grittier and sexier”, and also worked hard “to keep that sense of pace and that sense of urgency that makes YA so great”. Writing the two books proved to be very different experiences. “Our Infinite Fates took something from my soul,” she laughs, “and was a deeply emotional experience from beginning to end. Silvercloak was pure fun and joy!”