A Scent Of Frangipani

Three sisters work at a menial cleaning job to support themselves and care for their sick father. Tensions between the sisters build to a climax and explode in a violent machete dance. Strengthened by reference to their Samoan homeland, they must now redefine their identity within New Zealand society.

Colonial Singapore. A love triangle. Will one woman’s jealousy destroy everyone? It is 1931 in colonial Singapore. A Chinese bondmaid of fifteen stands trial for her aunt’s murder. Mei Mei, born on the inauspicious double seventh day, feels her doomed destiny taking over. The tide turns. Mei Mei and an English boy, Richard, fall in love. However, British-born Clementine has set her heart on marrying Richard and the social divide between coloniser and native keep the lovers apart. It is 1942. Japanese bombs are falling over Singapore. Richard rekindles his desperate romance with Mei Mei. To what lengths will Clementine go to separate the lovers? When Mei Mei disappears in the bombing and Richard is injured and loses his memory, is the path finally clear for Clementine to claim Richard as her own?

'I first met Jill Nevile when she was a regular contributor to the monthly meetings of the Gosford Bush Poets, but it was not until I read the collected verses in A Scent of Frangipani that Jill's true skill as a writer became evident. The way she has captured her obvious love of the garden, the beautiful area of Australia we both call home and her favourite overseas destinations is a credit to her. Jill has also not been afraid to bare her soul with poems of personal experience and her love and attachment to her furry friends. Well done, Jill, a great read.' - Peter Mace, 2012 Australian Bush Poetry Champion

"An overview of the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by the contemporary olfactory arts, which range from gallery and museum sculptures and installations, through the enhancement of theatre, film and music with scents, to the ambient scenting of stores and avant-garde chefs' use of scents in cuisine. Special attention is given to the aesthetics of perfume and incense and the question of their art status, as well as to the role of scent in the appreciation of nature and gardens. Ethical issues are discussed regarding ambient scenting, perfume wearing, and the use of smells in fast-food marketing. Because of the traditional neglect and denigration of the sense of smell and its aesthetic potential by philosophers from Kant and Hegel to the present, and by Darwin's and Freud's view of the human sense of smell as a near useless evolutionary vestige, the first parts of the book counter that tradition with both philosophical arguments and evidence from current evolutionary theory, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics and literature. Although the focus is on Western olfactory arts, the book draws on non-Western examples throughout. The book is aimed at both philosophers and general readers interested in the arts, and develops positions that should stimulate further discussion"--

This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated identity, personality, or sensibility. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

In 1948 I was posted, as a Political Officer, to a remote part of south-west Arabia on the edge of the great desert called the Empty Quarter. In valleys made fertile by seasonal flood-waters lay the remains of an ancient civilization. I found inscriptions and the ruin sites of towns, palaces and temples. Almost buried under the sand dunes were the tumbled walls of a great city. From here, two thousand years before, huge camel caravans had trudged their way along 1600 miles of burning sand and rocks to Petra and Gaza, burdened with a most precious cargo - frankincense, myrrh and other perfume materials for the courts, temples and perfume shops of Rome. My book Frankincense and Myrrh delved into the details of this romantic trade and led to a broader interest in the perfumes of ancient times. Then, researching on behalf of a perfume house into the Arab contribution to perfumery, I came across the collection of perfume recipes assembled by the Arab philosopher-scientist Yaqub al-Kindi, which have never been translated into English (some, which I have translated myself, are now included in an appendix to this book). I realized that in that work I had found key evidence to demonstrate how the medieval Arab perfume makers had been the bridge in perfume history between ancient and modern times. Perfumery could now be seen as an art with a continuous history of development since the dawn of civilization.

The first edition of this unique book established itself as an unparalleled source of information on perfume. Although it is primarily aimed at perfumers and others in the perfume industry, it has also found substantial sales among a wide range of others including aromatherapists, botanists, and many others who wanted to learn more about this faceted subject. The new edition is now aimed squarely at perfumery marketing specialists and others in the industry world-wide and covers in particular the needs of publicity/advertising teams and journalists, together with sales people and consultants at the counters who like to have a wide range of information at their fingertips. Changes include: an expansion of the number of profiles of the perfume houses, and of the 50 or so new perfumes worthy of record which have been launched since the previous edition. There is also increased coverage of the essences and the plants and other material from which they are derived. Coverage of perfume containers is substantially expanded and linked to other parts of the book.

Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life.