Base Notes

Adelle Stripe

£20.00

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Orion Publishing Co
13 February 2025
ISBN: 9781399608602
Hardback
288 pages

From the publisher

With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature - the Northern working class.

'It's got both style and warmth and made me cry' Amy Liptrot

'A beautiful book' Anna Wood

'Compelling and deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine

'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.