Leela Patel is sent to live with relatives in Paris after her father is killed in a Nairobi riot. Her mother takes Leela's two little brothers to England. Alone and suddenly transplanted, Leela must reinvent herself and adjust to this foreign place with its foreign language, as she works in her uncle's Indian grocery. She uses her beauty, as well as her uncanny sense of smell, to enter the social, business, and culinary worlds of Paris high society. But her feelings of loss of identity are overwhelming, and Leela soon becomes unmoored, moving from man to man in a series of unsatisfying and often brutal relationships. The exceptional sense of smell that made her a chef of some celebrity has now become her nemesis. Smell traces Leela's journey back to wholeness.