Whenever I start writing a new romance novel, setting is one of the most important considerations. My signature style incorporates exotic, beautiful, romantic settings, and for each novel I want to be sure I really capture the places I am writing about for the reader, so that they are real, tangible. To do this, I only write about places that I know, places I have visited. Then I know I can describe vividly.

Back when I first started studying the art of writing, at school and then at university, one of the lessons that stood out to me was to write description that appeals to the senses. Not only the eyes – it is very easy to simply describe the visual aspect of a scene. The other senses matter too. For me, the strongest of all is the sense of smell.

As Diane Ackerman wrote in her fascinating book A Natural History of the Senses, “Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.”

Personally, I have always been sensitive to scents – the heady, wonderful ones and the less appealing, and I think they greatly colour experiences and memories. In my writing I bring to bear my own reactions to scents, in the hope that they will create connections for my readers and truly transport them to the scene.

Today, I’m putting Indiscretion in the spotlight, to look at some of the different ways I appeal to the olfactory sense.

Conjuring beautiful scenes

In Indiscretion, love blooms in a beautiful location: Andalusia, Spain. As a keen gardener, I have always noticed flowers and greenery wherever I travel, and in the book I paint a backdrop of some of the colourful and fragrant flowers and herbs of the region: roses, jasmine, thyme, broom, lavender, jasmine, almond and orange blossom. The smells can be at once sweet and spicy, in keeping with Alexandra’s emotions:

“The night was full of subtle enchantment, the air warm and sweet, throbbing with the sounds of insects and batrachians, and fragranced by spicy breezes wafting up from the flowers and shrubberies.”

The scents are constant reminders of the exotic and beautiful nature of the surroundings, constantly affecting Alexandra wherever she goes. For example:

“Crimson bougainvillea cascaded down walls and honey-scented flowers spilled out of window boxes, their aroma mingling with the distinctive salty tang of the sea, invading Alexandra’s senses.”

Jarring with new and unusual scents

Alexandra was born in Spain, but left the country as a child and grew up in England. So Andalusia is strange and exotic to her. How often do you detect a new scent? What is certain is that you notice that scent, and react to it – as does Alexandra. For example, on her train journey when she arrives in Spain: “The strange smells of food, sweat and livestock permeated the atmosphere.”

All the new scents are intoxicating, and at times overwhelming:

“Sunset smouldered over the orange groves and olive trees. In the distance, the Sierras loomed with a strange foreboding in the fading light, their summits fiery and menacing. With the fragrance rising from the nearby tobacco plantations, the evening air was as intoxicating as opium.”

Conveying sinister atmospheres

Indiscretion is set in a beautiful land, but it is not without menace – an air of danger stalks Salvador and Alexandra. When Alexandra witnesses a funeral at the gypsy camp, I write: “The air was laden with smoke, the pungent smell of sweat and the nauseatingly sweet smell of dying flowers.” Then, inside the gypsy’s home: “the wide, low-roofed room was gloomy, lit solely by two paraffin lamps. A rancid smell of oil and damp filled the place.”

Contrasting locations

Much of the novel is set in Spain, but a small section of the action takes place in England. There, I call on the sense of smell to establish contrast – how different English soil is to Spanish. Different flowers, such as honeysuckle, scent the air, and on Chelsea Embankment in London there is “a wholesome smell of sea tar mingled with that of wet earth and rain”.

Building a sense of attraction

Aside from the surroundings, the scent of a person is important in establishing attraction. For Salvador, it is the scent of Alexandra’s hair that most appeals to him, and pulls him in: “He breathed in the fresh clean fragrance of her hair,  then tore himself away, as if  the very scent of her threatened to send his senses off on a new wild escapade.” For Alexandra, Salvador has a unique scent, a mix of soap, mint and tobacco, and it affects her so powerfully that when she picks up those smells elsewhere she is “flooded with the recollection of the few times they had been intimate”.

Personifying scents

Scents are so powerful, at times I find in my writing that they demand to take control, to exist in their own right. So I write of “the sweet balmy breath of orange blossom” and that “lemon, pomegranate and orange trees exhaled their intoxicating scent” and that “a breeze scented with garden flowers and vine leaves moved about the room all day like a caress”.

So there you have it: scent-sational Indiscretion. I wonder – now that they have introduced book soundtracks (music to accompany reading), perhaps someone will invest ‘book fragrances’ – a small vial of aromatherapy essence to accompany a book. For Indiscretion, I can imagine that would be a heady, sweet and sultry fragrance with notes of orange blossom and jasmine. Sublimely romantic!