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Base Notes
- Author
- Adelle Stripe
- Narrator
- Christine Bottomley
- Publisher
- Orion
- Publish Date
- 13 February 2025
- Run Time
- 7 hours 56 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Genre
- Memoirs, Perfume and incense, Nostalgia: general, Autobiography: arts and entertainment, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: coming of age, Narrative theme: interior life / psychological fiction, Narrative theme: love / relationships, Narrative theme: sense of place, Narrative theme: social issues / social problems
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What to expect
'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.
Critics Review
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A small, bleak masterpiece . . . the writing is immaculate
Chris Power, Observer
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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
★★★★★Telegraph
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Candid and compelling
Guardian
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It's the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures
TLS
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art
Suzi Feay, Spectator
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Working-class life pinned to the page
The Herald
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Poignant and grimly hilarious
Dazed
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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
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Deeply evocative
Wendy Erskine
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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
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A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir
The Bookseller
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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
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This is a beautiful book
Anna Wood
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An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention
Fergal Kinney
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Deeply personal and strikingly universal
Buzz Magazine
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Adelle Stripe
- Narrator
- Christine Bottomley
- Duration
- 7 hours 56 minutes
- Release Date
- 13 February 2025
- ISBN
- 9781399608640
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Orion
- Genre
- Memoirs, Perfume and incense, Nostalgia: general, Autobiography: arts and entertainment, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: coming of age, Narrative theme: interior life / psychological fiction, Narrative theme: love / relationships, Narrative theme: sense of place, Narrative theme: social issues / social problems
Synopsis
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' DAZEDA 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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