The heroine, Amanda, is struggling with her relationship with a fickle photographer, a man composed equally of selfishness, conceit and charm. The new assignment from her publisher to write a ‘For Dummies’ style guide to enlightenment looks like just the thing to take her mind off her worries.

Amanda is a lovely blend of cynicism and enthusiasm, and her adventures with a series of not-so-spiritually-evolved travellers are funny and well-observed. Early on she bonds over apple pie with a filthy, matted-haired young traveller called Devi Das, who speaks in the first person plural and who turns out to be from Kansas.  ‘Before we came to India, we had a lot of mental problems. We had to take medication every day. Now we don’t take any drugs at all. We just meditate. And we are truly happy for the first time in our life.’ Devi Das is the highlight of the book, a truly memorable character filled with life wisdom.

This is a very enjoyable book, but I have one word of warning: shortly after page 100, Amanda finds she is pregnant and the rest of the book becomes more of a quest to be a spiritually evolved yummy mummy. Nothing wrong with that, but if you’re not expecting it (and I wasn’t from the jacket and blurb) the shift of focus might come as a disappointment. Baby joy might be just the ticket for Amanda, but it’s not particularly interesting for the reader.

Lucy Edge is the author of the wonderful yoga memoir/travel book Yoga School Dropout. In her follow up, The Handbag and Wellies Yoga Club, she has found true love and moved to Norfolk. I still read the hilarious opening pages of YSD from time to time, as yoga newbie Lucy has her first encounter with India’s karma lovelies. Can Norfolk possibly be as exciting? The answer is, sort of, but the book takes a while to get going.

Lucy’s friends, the Cappuccino Gurus, don’t seem quite so enticing this time round, and Lucy’s partner David takes some getting used to as well. Mythic narratives deal with the quest for a mate; it’s that much harder to relate to an established relationship. (I had the same problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ – her boyfriend sounded frightful.) We need all of Lucy Edge’s sparkling humour to make nesting in Beccles as interesting as savasana in Rishikesh. It takes time but we get there in the end. I perked up with her NFN (normal for Norfolk) anecdotes and her account of a day as a beater for a shoot, and a posh dinner party. Ah! She hasn’t lost her comic touch! And soon she’s finding some pretty hard-core Kundalini classes (lots of breathing, chanting and huffing and puffing) in downtown Norwich, and a good venue for the essential post-yoga Pinot Grigio.

David, however, unprepossessing he might seem in his flat cap with his constant ‘yeah babes’, is The One, and Lucy, now 42, is ready for a baby. And like every other Western woman brought up to have it all, there’ll be no problem, surely? Just look at all those Hollywood actresses who pop out babies in their 40s. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go for fertility treatment, right?

Wrong. Very wrong. The increasingly desperate Lucy discovers that a) it doesn’t matter how healthy you are, it’s age that counts and b) at least some of those famous Hollywood women will have given birth with the help of donor eggs and c) her chances of becoming pregnant, even with treatment, are around 4%. She wouldn’t be Lucy Edge if she didn’t consider a range of holistic and alternative treatments, whether it’s acupuncture or discovering which ‘archangels or Descendant Master would help me conceive’.  The book is a wake up call to women brought up with the idea that babies can wait; Lucy starts lecturing her thirtysomething friends to freeze their eggs while her own struggle just gets more arduous. I won’t give away the ending, because the will-she, won’t-she is very gripping, in contrast to Cushman’s 250 pages of gestation. 

Enlightenment for Idiots by Anne Cushman (Shaye Areheart $24)

The Handbag and Wellies Yoga Club by Lucy Edge (Ebury £7.99)

The story continues, decade by decade. If you want to channel the 1920s, then go for Nuit de Noel, Shalimar or Arpege. The 30s brings Vol de Nuit, Je Reviens and the sadly lost Shocking by Schiaparelli (but the bottle is fabulous: a woman’s torso with a bunch of flowers for a head and a measuring-tape sash – also from RD’s collection). The 70s shook things up  with Alliage, Opium and Charlie (‘The world belongs to Charlie – the gorgeous sexy-young fragrance by Revlon’ – isn’t perfume advertising-speak great?)

It’s interesting to compare RD’s analyses of the scents with those of Tania Sanchez and Luca Turin in their celebrated Perfumes: The Guide, published last year. For example, Mitsouko is rated LT’s number one favourite perfume and he concludes ‘it still smells great, though arguably lasts less long than the old one’ while RD notes ‘I stopped wearing it when I could no longer recognise the original scent (a result of the formula changing’. Alliage is another one to compare and contrast: for TS it’s ‘an anisic rose-and-vetiver fragrance [made to] feel dry and powdery’ by the addition of ‘a ton’ of galbanum resin. For RD it’s a blend of pine, thyme, oakmoss and vetiver with a ‘small quantity of jasmine and peach’ and myrrh! At least they can agree on the vetiver.  Calandre to me is a pale version of Rive Gauche. To LT it’s slightly clearer in structure although ‘less ornate’; while RD calls it  ‘inspired by heat, movement and sex’!

We can forgive him for occasionally getting over-excited. RD is a romantic and not one to remark on ‘scads of indole’ in a perfume. His descriptions are a bit more ‘by the book’ but at least he doesn’t go so bonkersly synaesthesiac as to describe a perfume as resembling the blue lights on French railway tracks, as does Luca Turin.

The book has a few more interesting ‘DVD extras’: an interesting guide to ingredients, a brief history of bottle makers and biogs of the designers behind great perfumes (though Perfumes: The guide has much more on the individual noses and creators). This is a beautiful and fascinating book. It’s just a shame it has been so shockingly edited – it is filled with howlers.

(Black Dog Publishing £40)