Base Notes – Adelle Stripe in conversation with Terri White

  • DATE

    12 February 2025

  • TIME

    6:30 pm to 8:00 pm

  • AGES

    All ages welcome

  • PRICE

    £5

  • VENUE

    Serenity Booksellers, Stockport, SK6 4EA

Serenity Booksellers are delighted to be welcoming author and journalist Adelle Stripe to Stockport for the launch of her new memoir Base Notes: The Scents of a Life.

Warm, witty and frequently devastating, Base Notes is Adelle’s story told through the scents that have perfumed it, and a chronicle of Northern England in the late 20th century. Adelle will be discussing her life and work with host Terri White (Coming Undone) as well as answering audience questions and signing copies of the book.

Tickets are £5.00 each or £20.00 including a copy of Base Notes. Light refreshments are included in the ticket price.

Event starts at 6:30pm (doors at 6pm)

About the author:

Adelle Stripe is an author, poet and journalist based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Her books include the Sunday Times bestseller Ten Thousand Apologies, 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.

About 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.