The Scent of Exile

Talin grew up with her grandmother, who taught her the secrets of creating scents from childhood, and after her death, bequeathed her a perfumery company and a mysterious envelope. Following the instructions inside it, Talin finds the first notebook of memories of a little poetess, her great-grandmother. The entries in the diary span over fifty years. Shocked, Talin learns for the first time the true history of her Armenian lineage, which underwent genocide in the Ottoman Empire, as if she were getting to know her family anew. Why did her mother avoid conversations, and why did her grandmother always sleep with the light on? How can the past change the present so profoundly? Talin sets off in search of the remaining notebooks with a firm intention to find all the answers. The novel takes place in Turkish Maraş, Aleppo, Beirut, Athens, and Paris. Just like her grandmother's home, soaked in the scents of amber and jasmine, it is full of poems, meetings, separations, the pain of millions of people, and their hopes.