Perfume

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is an 18th-century Parisian born without an odour. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, he has a superhuman sense of smell. Patrick Suskind's twisted and grotesque novel follows this bizarre protagonist from the very day of his birth onwards, chronicling his life as an oddity and unsung villain, and detailing each and every person who rejects him along the way. I've never read anything like it.

Grenouille is abandoned at birth by an uncaring mother and passed from police to priest to orphanage to apprenticeship, each person instinctively revolted by him or fearing him. Grenouille grows into a very strange little man, both ugly and nondescript, and both genius and idiot. His sense of smell is extraordinary and Suskind details it in every way imaginable - pushing the barriers of a sense that most of us probably consider our least important, and exploring the powers that such a magnification of this sense could bring. Grenouille's motivations throughout the book remain unique as a result and it's easy to see why this book has remained as popular as it has in the twenty-odd years since it was first published.

Due to the aforementioned originality of the book's premise, there's no telling where it will lead you. One thing becomes clear as it rolls along though, there's a heavy theme of contempt for humanity at work underneath, and this makes for a witty mix of the ironically funny and loathingly tragic. At times the book is incredibly disturbing but the overall tone tends to downplay it to the point where it never really gets depressing or bogged down in its own sense of horror. I also think that, provided that you don't take everything at face value, there's a real resonance in the book's ending that makes sense of some of the book's many themes... death, desire, love, etc, etc.

And for the more historically-minded, there's even some in-depth examinations of various perfume-making techniques contained in the book. If you're interested at all in how we capture and mix smells, then this book can actually be very informative.