Base Notes

'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 tragi-comic tale of working-class womanhood is no cliched 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.

It is powerful and moving to see your own life and the lives of so many you know echoed in Stripe's tender memories, as she tugs on the glistening threads of her family history. Her life becomes a sweet triumph as she weaves those stories together with her own divinely unpredictable adventures. Generations of trauma, and the gimlet humour that often goes with it, are handled with soft elegance, clear sight and endless enduring love. And somehow, through the magic of Stripe's writing, you laugh out loud even more than you cry. This is a beautiful book. Anna Wood

Adelle Stripe is an author, poet and journalist based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Her books include the Sunday Times bestseller Ten Thousand Apologies, and Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a fictionalised biography inspired by the playwright Andrea Dunbar. She was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, Portico Prize for Literature and Penderyn Music Book Prize. As a journalist, she has contributed to The Quietus, New Statesman, Record Collector and Yorkshire Post. She is a recipient of Manchester University's Anthony Burgess Fellowship.

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