Permanence
Published on 2. April 2026
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-241-77630-8 (ISBN)
Description
One of the most anticipated books of 2026 as chosen by: Vogue, Stylist, Forbes, Oprah Daily and LitHub
'Like Severance for relationships' Oprah Daily
'Sophie Mackintosh turns the novel of adultery inside out' Lauren Elkin
'It will stay with me for a long time' Monica Heisey
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 stolen afternoons in hotel rooms, their time together painfully sweet and all too short. 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 and unfamiliar city: a place where adulterers can live openly as couples, 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 the 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?
From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure and Cursed Bread comes an intoxicating modern love story. Permanence is a thrillingly erotic and sharply relatable portrait of longing and obsession, intimacy and betrayal, possession and dispossession.
'Like Severance for relationships' Oprah Daily
'Sophie Mackintosh turns the novel of adultery inside out' Lauren Elkin
'It will stay with me for a long time' Monica Heisey
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 stolen afternoons in hotel rooms, their time together painfully sweet and all too short. 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 and unfamiliar city: a place where adulterers can live openly as couples, 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 the 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?
From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure and Cursed Bread comes an intoxicating modern love story. Permanence is a thrillingly erotic and sharply relatable portrait of longing and obsession, intimacy and betrayal, possession and dispossession.
Reviews / Votes
Chic, enthralling, utterly plausible, Mackintosh's latest novel is my favourite of the lot... Her writing hums with elegance . . . It's the kind of book that you'll want to read in one long gulp, the literary equivalent of a crisp glass of rose . . . [It] needs to be savoured * Sunday Times * Dreamlike, sensuous, intoxicating . . . Mackintosh probes the pull and hidden cost of illicit love in this unsettling speculative romance * iNews, 'Best new books to read in April 2026' * Inventive and convincing . . . A rich, alluring concept, offering much literary fun -- Sarah Moss * Guardian * Sophie Mackintosh is a master of the arresting premise . . . She's excelled herself here with a time-slip novel about an adulterous couple who, 18 months into their affair, wake up to find themselves in a parallel city where they can indulge their desires to their hearts' content . . . Mackintosh explores the implications, delusions and limitations of desire in its myriad forms in a transfixing novel that elegantly balances profundity and playfulness * Daily Mail * Mackintosh is an unquestionably skilled writer. Her prose is lush, and the way she captures desire is dizzying in its sensuality . . . A unique, introspective, poignant book that interrogates how much we can truly sacrifice for love, and what paradise really means. At once quietly devastating and creepily unsettling, it's her best work yet * Irish Times * It reads like a dream which is secretly a nightmare. I loved it -- Vincenzo Latronico, author of 'Perfection' Lyrical and precise . . . Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand . . . When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors . . . Permanence has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them * New York Times * 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' 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' Like Severance for relationships... Sophie Mackintosh is exactly the writer you want for this kind of uncanny desire experiment * Oprah Daily *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
364 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-77630-8 (9780241776308)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
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.