A perfume is made of three layers: the top note, the base note and the heart note. In 2022, Eva is adrift: her sense of smell has vanished after illness, her marriage is fraying, and her mother Lily is slipping deeper into dementia. But when Lily, in a moment of fractured clarity, speaks of something she did in Grasse twenty years earlier, Eva is compelled to follow the trail. In 2001, Lily arrives in Grasse constrained by the roles of wife and mother, only to find herself altered by the beauty of the town, its perfumers, and the possibility of another life. In 1532, Heli, the daughter of a glove maker, dreams of escaping the stench of her father’s trade to learn the art of her mother’s fragrant tinctures. When her mother falls ill, Heli’s experiments lead to a discovery that will leave its trace on history.
