She reminds me a little of the main protagonist in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘City of Girls’ – confident and unashamed in her pursuit of pleasure.

Unlike the previous example, this one does have the tiniest piece of relevance when it turns out that Nellie, Belle’s maid, has struck up an affair with Mr Graham, but having this information to hand destroys any chance that the revelation may have had on surprising the reader. When newly widowed Elizabeth arrives in Edinburgh to live with her late husband's aunt Clementina, she's determined to put her unhappy past in London behind her.The novel opens with newly widowed Elizabeth Rocheid arriving in Edinburgh to live with her late husband’s aunt Clementina at Inverleith House. While recording the flower she meets Belle Brodie, a young single woman who has a passion for botany and perfume making, who realised at an early age that she had the gift of luring men by using the enchantment of scent and has turned her passion into a lucrative business. Sheridan succeeds in what very few have attempted before; in imagining early 19th century Edinburgh as a genuine if imperfect city of enlightenment, a thrilling, optimistic and romantic landscape where science flourishes, beauty is created, wrongs are righted, possibilities are infinite, and women can begin to dream, at last, of how it might feel to be free. Elizabeth, who is newly widowed (and somewhat relieved to be), who has come to Edinburgh to make a new life dependent upon a relative.

This is based on a real-life event, which took place between 1820 and 1823, when the garden's many plants, bushes, flowering shrubs, aloes and cacti were transported to its current location.Sara has been named one of the Saltire Society’s 365 most influential Scottish women, past and present. Clementina is her dead husband's aunt, an outlandish (I love that word) woman who her nephew wishes to keep hidden away, outspoken and overtly political. Nothing keeps you turning the pages (except perhaps for a morbid curiosity of if it’s possible for the book to get even blander).