Constance

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 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, "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."--Emma Jane Unsworth, Author of Animals and Adults, "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, "This is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful book, a searing portrait of love, betrayal, redemption and complicity."--Laura Bates, Author of Everyday Sexism and Fix the System, not the Women, "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, TV writer and author of Go Lightly (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Joseph Zigmond is a non-fiction publisher living in Brighton with his wife and daughter. Constance is his first book.