Adelle Stripe at Serenity Booksellers Stockport

Writer and journalist Adelle Stripe is heading to Serenity Booksellers’ new Stockport store for the launch of her memoir Base Notes: The Scents of a Life, selected by The Observer‘s Rachel Cooke as a nonfiction preview pick for 2025.

“Warm, witty and frequently devastating”, Base Notes: The Scents of a Life is Adelle Stripe’s own story told through the scents that have perfumed it, and offers a chronicle of Northern England in the late 20th century. The Guardian sums it up thus: “With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature – the Northern working class.” Amy Liptrot says: “It’s got both style and warmth and made me cry.”

At this event, Stripe will be reading extracts from the book – published by White Rabbit this February – and discussing her life and work with host journalist, editor (including former editor-in-chief of Empire magazine) and fellow memoir author Terri White (Coming Undone). She will also be answering audience questions and signing copies.

Adelle Stripe is an author, poet and journalist born and based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Her books include the Sunday Times bestseller Ten Thousand Apologies, her music biography inspired by the strange life and curious times of notorious UK band Fat White Family, 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.

Here’s a bit more on the book:

“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 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.”