"She was dreaming... or perhaps she was dead, and so in heaven," thinks the protagonist of Sophie Mackintosh's incisive novel, Permanence, after she awakens next to her married lover for the first time. The clandestine couple, Clara and Francis, find themselves one morning in a strange apartment that somehow contains their favorite clothes, art, and books, in a strange city populated entirely by other couples. There are gold coins in their pockets and plenty of pleasant places to explore. In spare, precise prose, Mackintosh (The Water Cure; Blue Ticket) sketches a sort of paradise for the unfaithful, a realm where secretive love can finally be enjoyed in the open. This is enough for Clara, who is "committed to the cause of love as an organizing principle," though Francis occasionally has qualms about being apart from his young daughter and wife.
Then, they're returned to their respective homes in the real world, with no time seeming to have passed. A back and forth between worlds begins, and Mackintosh reveals what each character leaves behind and what they hope to return to. While Francis and Clara present as a classic midlife-crisis man and manic-pixie dream girl (he's an art history professor, she's a gallerist, they met at a museum), this feels extremely intentional; the love story Mackintosh writes is inherently clichéd in order to throw in sharp relief what isn't: what happens when desires are made manifest, and what kind of life can be made in the unreal. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator