Overview

Stylish and sumptuously romantic, charged with emotional electricity - this is the story of an affair... Clara and Francis are in love - but nobody knows it. For months they have been slipping away from their respective lives, sharing sweet, stolen afternoons in anonymous hotel rooms. Until one day they wake up in a bedroom neither of them recognises with no memory of how they got there. They find themselves in a strange, impossible city- a place populated entirely by adulterers. Here they can at last live openly as a couple, without fear of consequence, putting the theory of their love into practice. Here the sky is painted over the old town square in changeless, cloudless blue. Ripe fruits wait on their kitchen table each morning and the sunset comes down in a blaze of pink each night. And contact with the real world is impossible. As long as Clara and Francis are here, they only have each other. How do you know when you've found true love? How much would you sacrifice to keep hold of it? And how long can you stay in paradise before the cracks start to show?

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9780241776308

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Reviews

I loved this sensuous, moving, and quietly devastating novel. Sophie Mackintosh’s portrait of a couple in desperate thrall to doomed romance—and her revelations about the dangers and delights of intimacy, of vulnerability’s risks and rewards—will stay with me for a long time -- Monica Heisey, author of 'Really Good, Actually'

I loved this sensuous, moving, and quietly devastating novel. Sophie Mackintosh’s portrait of a couple in desperate thrall to doomed romance—and her revelations about the dangers and delights of intimacy, of vulnerability’s risks and rewards—will stay with me for a long time -- Monica Heisey, author of 'Really Good, Actually' A haunting and seductive novel which pulses with the possibility, or impossibility, of love. The unmet needs and violent hungers of Sophie Mackintosh’s characters do not remain within their bodies but instead fester in the crumbling monuments and shifting landscapes they inhabit. As her readers, we too are pulled into those glimmering psychic fissures -- Avni Doshi, author of 'Burnt Sugar' It reads like a dream which is secretly a nightmare. I loved it -- Vincenzo Latronico, author of 'Perfection' With Permanence, Sophie Mackintosh turns the novel of adultery inside out. This is the perfect imperfect love story: haunting, unsettling, uncanny -- Lauren Elkin, author of 'Scaffolding' I adore Sophie Mackintosh’s eerie, ethereal fictions – gorgeous, psychologically fraught fever dreams that linger in the mind for days after reading * LitHub * Like Severance for relationships... Sophie Mackintosh is exactly the writer you want for this kind of uncanny desire experiment * Oprah Daily * A haunting meditation on desire and consequence, where love is tested by the very freedom it often craves * Stylist, 'Nine non-traditional love stories for Valentine’s Day' * Astonishing and unforgettable. Reading Permanence is like dreaming – sensual and atmospheric, vivid and hazy at once. The novel shimmers like a vision or a memory; I loved spending time there -- Francesca Reece, author of 'Voyeur' A brilliant parable about desire, infidelity and devotion. With Sophie Mackintosh’s work, the thrill is in the slow, disquieting unfurling of the world. A dark gem that asks us to consider the cost of intimacy – I tore through it -- Erin Somers, author of 'The Ten-Year Affair' A devastating twist on the love story; Permanence asks us to examine whether desire can survive in the absence of longing, whether passion can only ever truly grow in the shadows. It is Mackintosh’s best novel yet -- Keiran Goddard, author of 'Hourglass'

Author Information

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of four novels, including The Water Cure and Cursed Bread. She has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize, has won a Betty Trask Award, and has been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others. Her new novel, Permanence, will be published in April 2026.

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