X-Book

Permanence

Click Buy to Log in and see personalised pricing.

Send as a gift Get in the xigxag app
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin

One of the most anticipated books of 2026 as chosen by Vogue, Stylist, Forbes, Oprah Daily and LitHub
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
© Sophie Mackintosh 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

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 rosé . . . [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
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
Author Sophie Mackintosh
Narrator Florence Howard
Duration 5 hours and 55 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781405988728
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Contemporary romance, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Speculative fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE

More from the same

Author

Narrator

About xigxag

xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK’s only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.

There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at £8.99. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from £3.99. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.

Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.

Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.