Base Notes
The Scents of a Life
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'It's got both style and warmth and made me cry' Amy Liptrot
'A beautiful book' Anna Wood
'Compelling and deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine
'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'
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, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.
Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.
'A beautiful book' Anna Wood
'Compelling and deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine
'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'
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, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.
Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.
- Published: Feb 13 2025
- Pages: 288
- 148 x 218mm
- ISBN: 9781399608602
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 HeraldWorking-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 BooksellerA fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir