The novel explores the underappreciated way in which scents, more than sights or sounds, trigger powerful, involuntary memory responses that are detailed and vivid. Only recently in the 2010s did researchers begin to understand how aromas can conjure memories and even store them within a section of the brain. Those scents are forever part of a person’s identity. Professor John Hartfell, pioneering researcher into the power of scents to recreate memories, is fond of telling his young, impressionable daughter during their long exile together on the island, “People lie, Emmeline, but smells never do.” Each scent is a memory, and each scent is a story.

The problem that perplexes Professor Hartfell is that aromas dissipate, even those captured on his scent-papers. If individual scents fade—a perfume, for instance, of your first lover or the smell of your grandfather’s cigar—that smell is forever retained within the brain, waiting for a recurrence of the smell to trigger that memory. When Emmeline’s father tests one of his scent-papers on her, one that records the smells of the forest, she recalls, “I was in the forest… The fragrance on the paper had been different, separate” (20).

Both of Emmeline’s parents appreciate the power of the sense of smell but for different reasons.