Base Notes cover art

Base Notes

The Scents of a Life

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Base Notes

By: Adelle Stripe
Narrated by: Christine Bottomley
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About this listen

 ★★★★★ Telegraph
'Deeply evocative' Wendy Erskine
'It's the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures' TLS

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.©2025 Adelle Stripe Love, Dating & Attraction Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships Women Funny

Critic reviews

Ingenious. A story of family in all its fractures and complexity... Its symphonic olfactory narration has a sharpness and depth of recollection which remains as vivid as their first experiencing
★★★★★
Candid and compelling
Wistful, sad and funny . . . top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art
Working-class life pinned to the page (Teddy Jamieson)
Poignant and grimly hilarious
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)
Deeply evocative (Wendy Erskine)
As the whiff of a past love's perfume takes part of me back to a party in 1979, [her] memoir is further proof that through scent time travel is indeed possible for us mortals . . . scratch and sniff Proust (George Shaw)
A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir (Editor's Choice)
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)
This is a beautiful book (Anna Wood)
An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention (Fergal Kinney)
Deeply personal and strikingly universal
All stars
Most relevant
Loved this as a memoir in second person, although I don't think the lists of perfume ingredients added much. While I love to hear regional accents in audiobook narration (too many narrators with RP or no accent), this one felt a bit overacted, and it distracted from the story.

Second person singular memoir

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Christine Bottomley performance is brilliant, I smelled every spritz, every cigarette every disappointment written in Adelle’s brilliant book. Listening to this helped with the olfactory setting more than simply reading could.

Get your ears and noses on this

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Loved this book, as a Northerner growing up around the same time it really resonated with me.

Moving, gritty, funny, emotional

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