Nour Sabran once had the finest nose in Grasse ? and she used it to copy other people's perfumes instead of making her own. Disgraced and exiled, she lands in New Orleans with a job most people couldn't do: erasing the smell of the dead from the houses they leave behind, so their families can finally let go.

Then a doctor finds a tumor growing out of the very tissue that gives her the gift. To live, she will have to lose her sense of smell completely, and forever. She has four months.

In the shotgun houses of Bywater, on the bayous of Terrebonne, and in the memory of a blind old teacher an ocean away, Nour goes looking for the one thing she has never done: to compose a single perfume that is truly her own, before the world goes silent.

A luminous novel about grief and craft, about what a house keeps after everyone is gone, and about the difference between copying a life and finally living one.