Base Notes

Already purchased

Click to open directly in the xigxag app.

Standard price shown. Sign in for personalised pricing.

Send as a gift Get in the xigxag app

Added to cart

Continue shopping or head to checkout

View cart
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

★★★★★ 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.

Critics Review

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
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
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
A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir
The Bookseller
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 xigxag

Experience the best audiobooks with xigxag, an innovative and user-friendly audiobook platform designed for seamless discovery, purchase, and enjoyment of your favorite titles. Our flexible pricing model offers bestselling audiobooks for less, providing affordable prices and the best audiobook deals without requiring a subscription. Perfect for gifting, xigxag also features convenient audiobook gift cards and in-app audiobook gifting options.

 

Beyond the listening experience, xigxag stands as an exciting alternative to big tech, embodying a strong commitment to sustainability and ethical practices. As the only B Corp certified UK audiobook service, we ensure a guilt-free listening experience from a leader in audiobook innovation.

 

Effortlessly search audiobooks, access honest audiobook reviews that evaluate both the content and narration, and easily discover hidden gems. Whether you prefer to download or stream top audiobook titles, xigxag provides the best possible listening experience anytime, anywhere, on the UK’s best independent audiobook app. Discover the future of audiobooks today.