Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, Blue Ticket, and Cursed Bread. Her novels have been nominated for prizes including the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has been named a face set to define the decade ahead by Vogue UK, and one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. She lives and works in London.

"Like 'Severance' for relationships, Permanence traps two secret lovers in a sealed-off city built for adulterers, where the affair can run forever . . . Mackintosh is exactly the writer you want for this kind of uncanny desire experiment."--Oprah Daily

"Inventive and convincing... A rich, alluring concept, offering much literary fun"--The Guardian

"A brilliant parable about desire, infidelity, and devotion... A dark gem that asks us to consider the cost of intimacy--I tore through it."--Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair

"I loved this sensuous, moving, and quietly devastating novel. Mackintosh's portrait of a couple in desperate thrall to 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." --Avni Doshi, author of Burnt Sugar

"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

Praise for Sophie Mackintosh:

"Ingenious and incendiary."--Laura Miller, The New Yorker

"Gorgeously dark, disturbing, and provocative."--San Francisco Chronicle

"[Mackintosh] is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread."--The Guardian

"Startling. . . . Mackintosh is a wonderful stylist; the full scope of her imagination, as well as the cohesion of her vision, is evident on every page."--The Irish Times

"Mackintosh's prose is eerie but minimalist - dreamlike yet grounded. Her style elevates plot to the status of fable or allegory without resorting to straightforward metaphor."--New Statesman

"Be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes." --Deborah Levy

"Mackintosh's fiction always has a gauzy quality, filled with strange, languid images, which rise to a narrative crescendo like clues in a detective novel. She makes it look effortless."--Jo Hamya, author of The Hypocrite

Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

Pub date: 2026-04-21

Length: 240 pages