Smell isn’t an easy thing to convey and, yet, Suskind manages it brilliantly. Perfume, when published, became an international sensation. Set in eighteenth century Paris, it gives us Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan with a phenomenal olfactory talent. He eats, walks, sleeps, dreams and lives entirely on smells. He can discover a unique scent in glass and brass doorknobs, in different stones and varieties of water, which a normal person cannot. “He can separate the simplest stench into its various elements – that of a human being, for example, being composed of cat faeces, cheese and vinegar.”

The fragrances described in Perfume are central to the story – they establish the protagonist’s response to lust, love, hate, and redemption. “In an age of ‘reason’ and a time of ‘progress’, Grenouille is a barbaric intruder. For him, this is a world stripped bare of its more elegant trappings and organised around the one fundamental principle of smell,” says author Peter Ackroyd in The New York Times.

But when Grenouille figures that he himself lacks any human odour and that makes him an outcaste, he decides to create the ultimate perfume – one that’s made up of the scents of thirteen virginal girls – that will help him to rule over humankind. But, for this, he needs to kill all of them.

This novel has been cited as one of the most-read German novels since Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. It has been translated into 48 languages and over 20 million copies have been sold worldwide. It also won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987. A film based on the book was released in 2006.

Published in 1985. Translated from the German by John E Woods, published in 1987.