Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh review – high-concept adultery fable

2026-03-26 - 07:19

Unfaithful lovers escape to an uncanny alternate world, in this compelling allegory for infidelity and desire Sophie Mackintosh has established a reputation for speculative literary fiction about young women’s desires and suffering at the hands of men. Her new novel, Permanence, is less plainly political than earlier work, concerned more with allegories of desire than oppression. The novel begins in an uncanny hotel, where Clara wakes beside her lover, Francis. Clara works desultorily in an art gallery and shares a flat with a friend. Francis is an academic, an art historian married to a lawyer, the father of a toddler, but on this day he and Clara find themselves in a parallel world in which adulterous couples live in what seems at first to be a permanent holiday. The realised fantasy is bourgeois, north European: a cobbled old city where the sun always shines and there are many restaurants with clean tablecloths and good wine. There are parks full of perpetually blooming flowers, old stone fountains; markets offering ripe tomatoes, olive oil and bread; scented soap in clean bathrooms, and nothing for Clara and Francis to do but make love, bathe, eat, drink and stroll the charming streets. Clara finds pretty dresses, girlish pale blue silk and yellow cotton, awaiting her in the wardrobe, her favourite books beside the bed. Continue reading...