Permanence
-
- Pedido anticipado
-
- Se espera: 2 abr 2026
-
- USD 14.99
-
- Pedido anticipado
-
- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An adulterous couple wakes up one morning in a strange new land with the freedom to enjoy their illicit relationship in Mackintosh's ethereal latest (after Cursed Bread). Clara, a young and spirited gallery receptionist, has been dating Francis, a married art history professor and father, for a year, but she never spent the night with him until now. They wake up to find themselves in an apartment stocked with their favorite books and clothes, surrounded by a city filled with golden light, music, and other happy cheating couples. They begin to settle into what they call "the city of impermanence," until they have a fight, triggered by Clara's sadness over not having Francis to herself if they return to the real world, and exacerbated by Francis's confession that he hopes to go back. Mackintosh invests more effort in exploring the characters than developing the speculative conceit. As a result, the novel feels more like a situation than a story, which might frustrate some readers. Still, she writes with delicate precision about Clara's yearning ("In the city there was time for all of this, and more. Time for the ordinary, to which we normally give little value"). It's a dreamy meditation on the power of love.
