Base Notes

The Scents of a Life

By: Adelle Stripe

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eBook | 13 February 2025

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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.