Description

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

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. 

About the Author

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Joseph Zigmond started as a HarperCollins graduate trainee in 2011, before joining William Collins as editorial assistant the following year. He has since gone on to acquire a range of non-fiction titles, including books by Bella Mackie, Microsoft c.e.o. Satya Nadella’s, and Dunkirk by historian Joshua Levine, which he commissioned directly from the author and which was made into a Christopher Nolan film of the same name. He went on to work as senior commissioning editor for John Murray. Constance is his first book.

Praise For…

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This is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful book, a searing portrait of love, betrayal, redemption and complicity.’
—Laura Bates, author of Everyday Sexism and Men Who Hate Women

‘A multilayered novel that beautifully observes the complex nature of longstanding friendships and the giddy immediacy of new love. Incisively witty yet deeply sensitive to the concerns of our age.’
—Francine Toon, author of Pine

‘It’s elegant, sharp, heartbreaking and deeply human. . . It dances on ruined surfaces, falls into hope, flirts with beginnings, denials, and the indulgence of memory as a fiction. It’s a searing exposé of the mutation of male desire. It questions what is toxic and what is catalytic in a lifetime, and what can be both . . . Astonishing.’ 
—Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals and Grown Ups

‘Witty and bleak, uncanny and humane, Zigmond’s Constance does not flinch from the truth. This beautiful novel gives us the strength and pain of being young, the lessons and loss of growing up – and a prophecy of the future, already inevitable, in which even our losses will be taken away.’
—Sam Thompson, author of Booker Prize longlisted Communion Town

‘Constance is a novel about possibility- what our world may yet become and what terror and love can be found by those trying to survive it. Zigmond’s writing transports us effortlessly across time, dropping us into cities in our past, present and future with ease. Unsettling and beautiful with a tantalising narrator who readers will be desperate to pin down.’
—Brydie Lee-Kennedy, author of Go Lightly

"Debut novelist Joseph Zigmond on capturing the myopia of young love and the importance of plot."—Image

"A multi layered novel that beautifully observes the complex nature of longstanding friendships and the giddy immediacy of new love. Incisively witty yet deeply sensitive to the concerns of our age." —Francine Toon, Author of Pine

"Constance: Joseph Zigmond’s razor-sharp debut novel explores a 60-year itch."—Buzz Magazine