The Heart Note

A novel of scent memory, the secrets mothers hold close to their hearts, and the daughters who uncover them

A mysterious confession leads one woman to Grasse, France, the perfume capital of the world, where she uncovers a deep-rooted secret that reverberates across decades.

2022: Eva never thought her life would look like this. She has lost her sense of smell after being ill, is losing her marriage, and her mother, Lily, is being moved into a care home as her Parkinson’s worsens. In the midst of a dissociated dementia state, her mother reveals that she wouldn’t want Eva to “find out what I did” twenty years ago when the pair traveled together in Grasse. Eva takes it as a sign: She must go to France.

2001: Eva is in her early twenties, traveling with her mother and the two couldn’t be more different. One is fiercely independent and imagines a big, creative life ahead, one is stuck in the role of “mother” and “wife.” When Eva takes off after a tense argument, leaving Lily alone in Grasse, Lily finds herself making perfume and at a chateau with a cast of characters, among them a handsome widower.

1532: Heli is the daughter of the most renowned glove maker in Grasse. She has an affinity for flowers, but washing leather in the canals leaves her ashamed of her stained hands and the stink of her skin. She longs for her mother, who makes intoxicating vapors and tinctures, to share her craft. But when her mother falls ill, Heli decides to play around with creating concoctions of her own, stumbling upon an invention that will change the town, the history of perfume, and have echoes far into the future.

Three women, each at a crossroads, collide in this beautiful, delicate novel that examines the emotional complexity of the mother-daughter bond.