Base Notes: The Scents of a Life

A Telegraph Best Book of 2025

'Ingenious' - ★★★★★ Telegraph

'Candid and compelling' - Guardian

'Wistful, sad and funny' - Spectator

'Working-class life pinned to the page' - Herald

'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'

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, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.

With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.

Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.