Sophie Mackintosh at Chapters

Sophie Mackintosh is one of the most compelling writers working in European fiction today. Her debut The Water Cure announced a voice of rare precision and menace, and her readers have followed her faithfully ever since.

Blue Ticket gave us a society that decides who gets to be a mother. Cursed Bread gave us desire as a kind of haunting. And now Permanence: Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they have slipped away from their respective lives, sharing stolen afternoons in anonymous hotel rooms. Until one day they wake up in a bedroom neither of them recognises, with no memory of how they got there, in a strange and impossible city populated entirely by adulterers. Cloudless skies. Ripe fruit on the table each morning. No way out. Just the two of them, and the question they can no longer avoid. The Guardian called it "inventive and convincing... a rich, alluring concept, offering much literary fun."

Dread runs through all of Sophie's work, alongside a particular kind of female endurance, the sense that the world has been arranged against her women and that surviving it will cost them something they didn't know they had. Sharmaine has been reading her since the beginning and this is the conversation she's wanted to have.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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