Anne Rosenbaum leads a life of Los Angeles privilege: the wife of a Hollywood executive, Howard Rosenbaum, and mother of their teenage son, Sam. Years ago Anne and Howard met studying literature at Columbia--she, the daughter of a British diplomat from London; he, a boy from an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

When one of Howard's friends asks Anne to make a reading list, she agrees and soon finds herself leading a book club for the industry elite. But when a crisis of identity turns Howard back toward the Orthodoxy he left behind, Anne must set out to save what she values above all else: her husband's love.

"The Perfect Scent "is the thrilling inside story of the global perfume industry, told through two creators working on two very different scents. The first is commissioned by the French luxury brand Hermes, and developed by a perfumer named Jean-Claude Ellena, who begins his search for the scent on the banks of the Nile. The second is a celebrity fragrance, developed in New York by movie star Sarah Jessica Parker and a team of perfumers from a global conglomerate. Chalder Burr, the "New York Times"'s perfume critic, spent a year behind the scenes watching both creators at work. His thrilling narrative follows each scent from the initial concept to the worldwide launch. "The Perfect Scent" is the story of two daring creators, two very different scents, and a billion-dollar industry that runs on the invisible magic of perfume.

The @lt;b@gt;Emperor of Scent@lt;/b@gt; tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science upside down, leading to a solution to the last great mystery of the senses: how the nose works.