A perfume. A secret. The fates of two women, decades apart and a novel I couldn’t simply move on from.
There are books you read, close, and immediately reach for the next one. The Perfume Collector is not one of them.
Kathleen Tessaro’s novel follows Grace Monroe, a young woman from London’s polished social circles, quietly bored with the life expected of her until a letter arrives from a lawyer, informing her of an unusual inheritance. To claim it, she must travel to Paris. It’s the beginning of an unexpected journey.
The inheritance comes from a woman named Eva d’Orsey someone Grace has never heard of. Her only lead is an old, abandoned perfume shop, where she slowly uncovers the story of her mysterious benefactress. Madame d’Orsey, it turns out, lived an extraordinary life: from the jazz clubs of 1920s New York to the casinos of Monte Carlo, hers was a world of glamour, reinvention, and secrets secrets that still echo into Grace’s present.
I usually move from one book to the next without much thought. This one, I couldn’t. I read it with real passion, gripped by its suspense and its mystery, genuinely marked by Eva and Grace’s intertwined stories. And when I turned the last page, I simply wasn’t ready to start another book. I needed to sit with it a while first which, for me, says everything about how good it is.
Woven around three evocative perfumes, The Perfume Collector explores memory, desire, and the complex bond between muse and perfumer. If you love a story with genuine mystery at its heart, this one deserves a place on your shelf.
