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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

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'

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