With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature - the Northern working class.
12th May 2025
Hardcover
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature - the Northern working class.
Description
'A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir' - The Bookseller
'Ingenious' - ????? The Telegraph 'Candid and compelling' - The Guardian 'Wistful, sad and funny' - The Spectator 'Working-class life pinned to the page' - The Herald'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 cliched 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.Critic Reviews
A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir -- Editor's Choice The Bookseller
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
★★★★★
Candid and compelling Guardian
Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art Suzi Feay, Spectator
Working-class life pinned to the page -- Teddy Jamieson The Herald
Poignant and grimly hilarious Dazed
It's got both style and warmth and made me cry. I loved this rock and roll spirit coming out of small town Yorkshire -- Amy Liptrot
Deeply evocative -- Wendy Erskine
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 -- George Shaw
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 -- Rob Doyle
This is a beautiful book -- Anna Wood
An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention -- Fergal Kinney
'Deeply personal and strikingly universal' Buzz Magazine
About the Author
Adelle Stripe is an author, poet and journalist based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Her books include the Sunday Times bestseller Ten Thousand Apologies, and Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a fictionalised biography inspired by the playwright Andrea Dunbar. She was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, Portico Prize for Literature and Penderyn Music Book Prize. As a journalist, she has contributed to The Quietus, New Statesman, Record Collector and Yorkshire Post. She is a recipient of Manchester University's Anthony Burgess Fellowship.
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12th May 2025
