Book review: Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)

I’m very eclectic each time I choose ‘my next book’, and I don’t review everything I read. I pick my choices from various sources: a bookshop meander, a word-of-mouth tip, social media. I chose PERMANENCE by Sophie Mackintosh (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) after I saw it recommended on Instagram @thingsthatIveread and I wasn’t disappointed. This is a beautifully written, disturbing, shifting novel, with love, desire, and sex at its heart. Clara and Francis are having an affair, but she is younger, single, and, one might add, more vulnerable; he is married with a daughter. The novel begins as the pair wake up in a bedroom within an unknown, ‘perfect’ City of Impermanence, with blues skies and perpetual sunshine, peopled only by other adulterous couples. It’s a place where Clara and Francis can openly acknowledge their relationship, instead of hiding away, and at first, it’s apparently ‘paradise’, because they can always be together. Baffled by where they are, unsure what to believe, as the book progresses Clara and Francis shuttle back and forth to real life, time-travelling, but always returning to the City of Impermanence, each time their separation in the ‘real world’ becomes unbearable. They’re never sure how long they will get to stay, or whether they can ever go back to their old lives. Unsurprisingly, it’s not long before cracks appear: the light-filled flat grows shabbier, they must take a job in order to live, and they start to hurt one another, both physically and emotionally. The book poses the question: can a relationship ever exist in a state of permanent perfection, severed from the ‘real’ world, or is it always destined to falter and come to an end? There’s a hyper-visual, dreamlike quality to the descriptions of the City of Impermanence, where the fruit they eat is extra-juicy, their favourite clothes magically appear in their wardrobe, and where the sun always seems to shine - as a reader, it reminded me of fairytales, perhaps with an Angela Carter twist - but it soon becomes clear that there’s a reverse, nightmare quality to the city, too. I’m very attracted to novels that surprise me, and books that tackle emotional issues with brutal clarity, and as a reader, I found PERMANENCE delivered on both fronts. This is an unusual, haunting, laser-sharp uncovering of a love affair. It is Sophie Mackintosh’s fourth novel: her first book, THE WATER CURE, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, and she was named on the Granta Best Young British Novelists list in 2023. I’m very tempted to go back and read the rest of her work.

PERMANENCE by Sophie Mackintosh (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)