The scent of exile

Talin grew up with her grandmother, who from childhood taught her the secrets of creating fragrances, and after her death bequeathed a perfume company and a mysterious envelope to her. Following the instructions from it, Talin finds the first notebook of memories of a young poetess, her great-grandmother. The diary entries span over fifty years. Shocked, Talin learns for the first time the true story of her Armenian family, who survived the genocide in the Ottoman Empire, as if she is getting to know her family all over again. Why did her mother avoid conversations, and why did her grandmother always sleep with the light on? How can the past so profoundly change the present? Talin sets out to find the remaining notebooks with a firm intention to find all the answers. The novel takes place in Turkish Marash, Aleppo, Beirut, Athens, and Paris. Like her grandmother's house, Talin's home is filled with the scents of amber and jasmine, it is full of poems, meetings, partings, the pain of millions of people, and their hope. Ondine Hayat is a Frenchwoman of Armenian and Lebanese descent. She is the author of seven books, a practicing psychotherapist, co-founder, and ambassador of the charitable foundation "For a Better World," which unites 15 NGOs worldwide. She lives and works in Paris. "A powerful, poetry-filled novel celebrating the strength and resilience of the human spirit," - ActuaLitte.