Base Notes Audiobook By Adelle Stripe cover art

Base Notes

The Scents of a Life

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Base Notes

By: Adelle Stripe
Narrated by: Christine Bottomley
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A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR - Told with warmth, wit and unflinching humour, BASE NOTES shares an alternative confessional of Northern working-class life in the 1980s

'Candid and compelling' GUARDIAN
'Deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine
'A small, bleak masterpiece' Chris Power, OBSERVER
'Poignant and grimly hilarious' DAZED

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.©2025 Adelle Stripe Biographies & Memoirs Love, Dating & Attraction Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships Women Funny

Critic reviews

A small, bleak masterpiece . . . the writing is immaculate
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
It's the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures
Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art
Working-class life pinned to the page (Teddy Jamieson)
Poignant and grimly hilarious
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)
A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir (Editor's Choice)
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
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