Permanence

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

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