Prix de L’Union Interalliée
Prix des Lecteurs CIC Ouest

A luscious plunge into the French and Soviet perfume industry of the 1930s with a strong heroine.

Nina is a young, brilliant perfumer in a world dominated by men. But it’s one generous man in particular who takes her under his wing to help her succeed — Léon Givaudan, who co-founded with his brother the industry-leading company Givaudan.

Nina’s past is a tragic one. She was born and raised in Moscow but she had to flee shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution with her mother and brother when she was just 12 years old. They were forced to leave without her father; a successful perfumer who was imprisoned and killed by the revolutionaries.

As the 20th anniversary of the Revolution approaches, Josef Stalin demands that a perfume be created for the occasion. His mistress and head of the state-run perfumery company, Polina Molotova, organizes a competition in which she will select the three finalists and Stalin himself will declare the winner. To help modernize the Soviet perfume industry, Polina visits Givaudan in Lyon to gather information and there she has a chance encounter with Nina. Nina is astonished to recognize the perfume that Polina is wearing; it’s a perfume that was created by Nina’s father for her birthday. She knows now that her father is still alive ; the never wrote down his formulas.

Nina is determined to enter Stalin’s competition and travel to Moscow to save her father. But she finds out that perhaps he didn’t need saving and he’s not at all the man she had been mourning all these years.

Theresa Révay takes us behind the scenes during the glory days of the international perfume industry in this story that is very personal for her; she is a descendant of the Givaudan family.

Theresa Révay is the author of a dozen novels including 2005’s Livia Grandi ou le Souffle du destin for which she was a finalist for the Prix des Deux-Magots. She was the recipient of the Prix Historia for Historical Fiction in 2014 for L’Autre rive du Bosphore and her novel La vie ne dans qu’un instant (Albin Michel, 2017) was awarded the Prix Simone Veil. Her works have been translated into over ten languages.