Hardback

‘Base Notes’ chronicles a pre-internet smalltown England of the 1980s and 90s already fading from view. Memories are triggered by perfumes and their aspirational advertising campaigns, the scenes from Adelle Stripe’s adolescence and young adulthood Proustian in their poetic scale and universality, but born out of a droll comedic tradition too. At its centre are the fraught relationships between mothers and firstborn daughters who discover they harbour vastly differing ambitions and desires. A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Andy Warhol, Stripe’s is a universe of daytime drinking and religious fervour, low-income Tories and workaholic farmers, everyday sexual predators and smalltown suicides, late night chatlines and morning frost on curtainless windows. But it’s also gloriously, unapologetically alive – like Elena Ferrante in Thatcher’s Britain or a Billy Liar who finally gets on the train.