Base Notes
On sale
12th February 2026
Price: £10.99
★★★★★ 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.
‘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.
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Reviews
Deeply evocative
Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art
Working-class life pinned to the page
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
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
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
★★★★★
Poignant and grimly hilarious
A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir
This is a beautiful book
An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention
It's got both style and warmth and made me cry. I loved this rock and roll spirit coming out of small town Yorkshire
Deeply personal and strikingly universal
Candid and compelling