• Base Notes by Adelle Stripe
  • Base Notes by Adelle Stripe
1 0

Base Notes

Scenes from a Northern Girlhood
  • Author
    • Adelle Stripe
£10.99
£10.99

Anticipated publication date

Feb 12, 2026

We will deliver the product within a reasonable period of time following the publication date.

The publication date is an estimated date only and is subject to change. We anticipate that the book will be published on this date. However, should the estimated publication date change for whatever reason, we will notify you within a reasonable period of time.

????? Telegraph
'Deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine
'It's the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures' TLS

A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe's formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, predacious strangers and punk rock energy. Snapshots of wild abandon and dead-end jobs pepper this evocative tale of metamorphosis alongside a wry clear-eyed account of maternal conflict, compassion and, ultimately, acceptance.

Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, Base Notes is a poetic, poignant and bleakly comic chronicle of one woman's coming of age in Northern England, an alternative confessional of working-class life in the closing years of the late twentieth century.

  • Published: Feb 12 2026
  • ISBN: 9781399608626
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Press Reviews

  • Anna Wood

    This is a beautiful book

  • Wendy Erskine

    Deeply evocative

  • Amy Liptrot

    It's got both style and warmth and made me cry. I loved this rock and roll spirit coming out of small town Yorkshire

  • Fergal Kinney

    An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention

  • George Shaw

    As the whiff of a past love's perfume takes part of me back to a party in 1979, [her] memoir is further proof that through scent time travel is indeed possible for us mortals . . . scratch and sniff Proust

  • Rob Doyle

    Adelle Stripe locates a seam of universal longing amidst a northern soul's sundry particulars: epic drinking, Morrissey lyrics, embarrassing family, bedsit love, wayward journeys, and the recollected scents and songs of a lifetime's pain, passion and loss
  • Telegraph
    Ingenious. A story of family in all its fractures and complexity... Its symphonic olfactory narration has a sharpness and depth of recollection which remains as vivid as their first experiencing ★★★★★

  • Teddy Jamieson

    The Herald
    Working-class life pinned to the page
  • Suzi Feay, Spectator
    Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art
  • Dazed
    Poignant and grimly hilarious
  • Guardian
    Candid and compelling

  • Editor's Choice

    The Bookseller
    A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir
  • Buzz Magazine
    Deeply personal and strikingly universal