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  • Published: 2 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988728
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

Permanence




Stylish and addictive, a romantic novel about obsession and cruelty from the cult author of The Water Cure

Clara and Francis have been meeting in hotel rooms for years, stealing time away from their 'real lives' to pursue a secret, all-consuming love affair. Until one day they wake up in a room neither of them recognises, with no memory of how they got there.

This is the Other City – a self-contained, artificial paradise where adulterers can live openly as a couple for as long as they want. The sky is painted over the town square in unchanging, cloudless blue. Perfectly ripe fruit waits for them on the coffee table each morning. Cruelty is not allowed here. Activities without your other half are not allowed. And contact with the real world is not allowed.

How much would you sacrifice in exchange for everything you ever wanted? And how long can you stay in paradise before the cracks start to show?

  • Published: 2 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988728
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

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Praise for Permanence

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'

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 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'

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'

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'

A truly beautiful book... Sophie Mackintosh offers a nuanced, confronting and original perspective on love and desire. But she also probes fundamental questions about agency and freedom with wry, refreshing intelligence. This book made me think a lot and I also found it very moving. I loved it

Rachel Connolly, author of 'Lazy City'

I adore Sophie Mackintosh’s eerie, ethereal fictions – gorgeous, psychologically fraught fever dreams that linger in the mind for days after reading

LitHub

[The] premise feels like Severance for relationships... Sophie Mackintosh is exactly the writer you want for this kind of uncanny desire experiment

Oprah Daily
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