Perfume
The Story of a Murderer
- Themes
- Murder, Obsession with scent, Sensual depravity
Who it’s for
- Readers interested in murder tales driven by an obsessive pursuit of scent
- Readers drawn to unsettling stories of sensual depravity
Where it sits
- 58%Horror
- 52%Literary Fiction
- 24%The Classics
How strongly BookFrontier reads the book as belonging to each subject.
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For younger readers: The Phantom of the Opera, A Tale of Plagues and Perfumes, The Corpse Queen
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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell.
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As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.
Translated from the German by John E. Woods.
Publisher details
Publisher categories
- The Classics
- Horror
- Literary Fiction
- Authors
- Patrick Suskind
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- February 13, 2001
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- The Classics