Nose Dive

What is smell? How does it work? And why is it so important?

Harold McGee, leading expert on the science of food and cooking, has spent a decade exploring our most overlooked sense.

Nose Dive is the amazing result: it takes us on an adventure across four billion years and the whole globe, from the sulphurous early Earth to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, and back to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde are escaping between the keys.

A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distils the science behind smells and translates it into an accessible and entertaining sensory and olfactory guide. We'll sniff the ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and extraordinary (ambergris and truffles), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the challenging (swamplands and durians). We'll smell each other. We'll smell ourselves. Here is a story of the world, of all of the smells under our noses.