Base Notes

Adelle's writing has a rare verve, giving vivid evocations of times, places and scents. 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 *
Central to Base Notes is a story of family in all its fractures and complexity: the relationships between parents, children, siblings and spouses; how we attempt to both escape and accept ourselves and others with varying degrees of success. Its symphonic olfactory narration has a sharpness and depth of recollection which remains as vivid as their first experiencing. A desire to immerse the reader in a certain perspective or experience risks becoming florid on the page, but Stripe successfully avoids this with her balanced prose, candid yet intimate * Telegraph *
This is English author Adelle Stripe's account of her early years in the north of England - the dead-end jobs, the daytime drinking and the smell of vintage perfume. Working-class life pinned to the page. * Teddy Jamieson, The Herald *
They're here - the scents of a life - in all their heady, olfactory intensity. But so too, in its joyous, messy, difficult and gloriously rich reality, is the sense of a life. From ice-rinks to chatlines, leather factories to delivery calves on a Yorkshire farm, Adelle Stripe is alive to love and light, loss and gain, the dark and comic. A marvel of specificity, it's compelling and deeply evocative. Plus, like the best of perfumes, it has a warm and lasting power * Wendy Erskine *
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 *
An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention, never better than when observing the various traps of working-class womanhood or being labelled 'a strong northern voice'... told with her now trademark restraint, humour and empathy. A brilliant and singular book. * Fergal Kinney *
As the whiff of a past love's perfume takes part of me back to a party in 1979 Adelle's memoir is further proof that through scent time travel is indeed possible for us mortals ... scratch and sniff Proust * George Shaw *
I loved Base Notes. In this moving, at times acutely relatable memoir of coming up awkward and artistic in the hinterlands, 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 *
Pin-sharp observation renders even tragic material palatable . . . wistful, sad and funny * Suzi Feay, Spectator *