Base Notes: Scenes from a Northern Girlhood

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.

★★★★★ Telegraph Books of the Year
'Candid and compelling' Guardian
'It's the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures' TLS
'A small, bleak masterpiece' Observer