Permanence is a novel with a weird plot, weird protagonists and a weird premise. Seasoned readers of Sophie Mackintosh will be expecting nothing less. In her debut novel, The Water Cure (2018), she depicted a family who isolate their daughters from men by moving to an abandoned hotel; in Blue Ticket (2020), she imagined a world in which women’s lives are determined by a ticket they receive on the day of their first period. With these darkly inventive books, Mackintosh recalls the work of Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. 

The central characters in Permanence are Francis, a middle-aged art professor, and Clara, a younger woman who works at a gallery. They are deep into an affair. Francis is married to someone else, but Clara is besotted with him and has accepted the arrangement. The story starts as they wake in what appears to be a hotel room, one of many they have visited together. Their relationship has so far been conducted in rooms with ‘starched sheets and creamy stationery and tiny shampoos’: neutral, sealed spaces, cut off from the world. It soon becomes clear that this hotel is anything but ordinary. 

Francis and Clara have been mysteriously transported to an alternative universe, a city of adulterers. Here, the only other inhabitants are couples: ‘couples eating and cooking and fucking and arguing and sleeping and dancing … couples at each other’s knees, at each other’s throats’. At first, the place appears to