The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading and discussion of Patrick Skind's Perfume . We hope they will provide you with a variety of approaches to this vividly imagined historical novel. Set in eighteenth-century France, Perfume explores the evolution of a remorseless killer during an era of intense contradictions, an age in which poverty, filth, and superstition coexisted uneasily with the Enlightenment's ideals of progress, liberty, and reason.