Constance

A daring debut about teenage love, overpowering friendship and everyday blindness from a stunning new voice in fiction.

In the summer of 2006, a chance encounter on the London Underground finds eighteen-year-old Ali tagging along with a school friend and a mysterious girl to a club. The girl is Cece, and she seems to be everything Ali is not. For one night he is transfixed and transformed into someone who might belong. All he knows is he will remember it forever.

In 2064, Ali takes his final flight out of the UK to Morocco, in a world upturned by climate collapse. He has a wife and a daughter, reasons to return. Yet Ali is willing to abandon everything to find Cece again, finally to recapture that long summer night when he was young, and to understand how the actions taken — and not taken — have changed all their lives.

Luminous and full of longing, Constance is a novel of teenage fragility, male blindness and everyday complicity.

‘A heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful book, a searing portrait of love, betrayal, redemption and complicity.’ — Laura Bates, author of Everyday Sexism

‘Incisively witty yet deeply sensitive to the concerns of our age.’ — Francine Toon, author of Pine

‘It’s elegant, sharp, heartbreaking and deeply human.’ — Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Adults

‘Witty and bleak, uncanny and humane.’ — Sam Thompson, author of Communion Town