The Rose Water Year

About this book

Every April, for the few weeks the damask roses bloom, the valley of Timaziri in the High Atlas smells the way Leila Benhaddou's childhood did, before Paris, before the perfume house, before she learned to call that smell a raw material. Her grandmother Lalla Rachida has distilled the valley's rose water for sixty years in a copper still older than the road, and now, at eighty six, she has summoned her granddaughter home to hand over the keys. The perfume house is delighted. Leila arrives with a contract in her bag: exclusive rights to the valley's crop, a tasteful acquisition of the old distillery, a heritage story for the marketing.