Permanence

Announcing my fourth novel

A little update today… I’m so happy to share that my fourth novel, Permanence, will be published in spring 2026! Here’s the announcement in The Bookseller, and below in Publisher’s Weekly.

Permanence follows a couple having an affair – Clara and Francis – after they wake up in a mysterious city, populated only by other couples who are also having affairs. The moon glows pink, love songs play constantly, the bars and restaurants are chic and abundant, motifs from their ‘real’, secret, life recur everywhere, and they can’t leave the other’s sight without suffering physical pain. It’s a landscape built of devotion, a relationship’s mythology made manifest. It’s both paradise and purgatory. And the city has its own whims, its own rules, that they must decode if they wish to stay.

It’s an ode to the transgressive domestic, to dailiness’s erotic potential. It’s also extravagantly romantic, bittersweet, and a little weird. I semi-jokingly described it ages ago to my agent as “Simple Passion meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and like, maybe??

If you’ve been reading previous newsletters you’ll have seen the novel crop up, or sensed me obsessing over it in the background, and it’s so exciting to be able to finally talk properly about it. For now a few extra thoughts, in no particular order:

PRINT YOUR DRAFTS!!!!

1. Creating the city was so fun. I am reminding you that writing should be fun! I think when I leaned into the playfulness, rather than tried to be too serious, too complicated, it started to truly work.

2. Since finishing the novel I’ve missed it, I’ve felt sad, like a low-level hangover. I’ve felt a little like this with other books, but not to the same extent.

3. But I can think of few happier times in my life than when one of the novel’s later drafts came together, during some time spent in Berlin. Every morning I woke up in a single bed with summer light streaming through the giant window, and I walked to the same place to work and drink eis-cappucinos. I also swam in lakes, felt the sun on my face, danced until dawn. I’m really grateful to have had those weeks.

4. Sometimes there are times in our lives of incredible intensity, of crazy love or change or unbelievable grief, and then also there are fallow years where little happens, years you barely notice in their passing. And I think maybe the book is not just about intensity but about the space around it too, like the space it leaves in its passing and the space we leave open in our waiting for it.

5. But first and foremost it’s a sincere love story – grand and sentimental and utterly, almost religiously, devotional in its upholding of desire as belief system.

6. But also, you think you know what a book is about at the start of writing it, and by the time you’ve finished writing it’s always a completely different book, and you too are different.

7. Print your drafts out! Even if you only do it once.

8. The novel contains an invented still life painting that I had fun thinking about, describing, and even sketching. But as I wrote this novel I also sometimes looked to a different, existing, painting – Die Nacht, by Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler – where several figures in varying states of nakedness lie on the ground, one in the centre terrorised by a deathly creature. The way that two characters in the right-hand corner of the painting lay together stood out to me from the first time I saw it. I grew to feel close to them, as if they were Clara and Francis, holding to each other through every uncertain, snatched, impossible night.

   

9. Yesterday I was early to meet friends for dinner in central London, and so I went into the National Gallery for a little walk around. I was thinking about the book, about letting it into the world. Just on my way out I stopped in front of a painting I’d never seen before but which drew my eye for whatever reason, a vibrant green valley.

10. And it turned out to also be by Ferdinand Hodler, the only one of his paintings in a London collection. And I thought about how funny these tiny coincidences are, threaded through our lives, through even our most inconsequential decisions. And I thought that maybe I am not yet done with intensity, or it might not be done with me. I thought about the joy both of lush greenery, and of being held through the strange and lonely dark.