Permanence

Cursed Bread author Mackintosh’s newest manages to be taut and luminous without shying away from the unsettling edges of life. It tells the story of an affair—hidden, illicit—and the strange, dreamlike city that seems designed to contain it, almost on an alternate plane. Somehow, this premise delivers a story that merges Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian-style frameworks with the precarious, Virginia Woolf–ian sense of dailiness so recently captured by Alison Espach in The Wedding People without veering into the overtly literary territory of Katie Kitamura’s The Audition. While the idea of an alternative city may at first glance feel a bit formulaic, Mackintosh quickly dispels expectations and builds something entirely new. With sensory imagery from breakfast foods to paintings paired with less tangible moments and meanings, the book feels like a glimpse into desire, in part as a real sensation but perhaps even more as a fiction and fantasy.