Permanence

De: Sophie Mackintosh

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

© Sophie Mackintosh 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

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')

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')