Adelle Stripe - Base Notes

We are absolutely delighted to announce that we have Adelle Stripe joining us here at The Heath Bookshop. Adelle will be talking about her book 'Base Notes' and will be interviewed by Catherine from The Heath Bookshop.

This event is one that is particularly special to The Heath Bookshop. Catherine is a big fan of Adelle's writing - her novel 'Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile' can always be found on our "Books We Love" table alongside 'Ten Thousand Apologies' the biography co-authored with Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family.
Adelle and Catherine both grew up in Tadcaster in North Yorkshire and went to the same school (but they didn't know each other!).

Adelle's latest book, Base Notes, is a beautifully written memoir, crafted in Adelle's usual literary style with an original and creative presentation of a fascinating life.  If you haven't read any of Adelle's work, then what better way to start than by coming along to this event.  Adelle's previous books are also available in the shop now or via our Bookshop.org page if you don't live nearby.

Born in 1976, Adelle Stripe grew up in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire and worked a variety of dead-end jobs until enrolling at university as a creative writing student at the age of 30. Originally a poet, she published her first three collections as chapbooks, and wrote short stories for small press journals and literary magazines. 

Her debut novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, was based on the life and work of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. First published by Wrecking Ball Press, it was later acquired by Fleet (Little, Brown). Black Teeth was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Portico Prize for Literature. It was an Observer book of the year. In 2019, the novel was adapted for stage, and received widespread critical acclaim.  

In 2022, her account of the controversial Irish/Algerian punk band, Fat White Family, was published by White Rabbit. Ten Thousand Apologies tells the band’s story in an innovative novelistic method. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, and a Rough Trade book of the year. The biography was shortlisted for the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize.  

Adelle Stripe holds a PhD by Research in creative writing and is a Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester. As a journalist, she has written for The Quietus, Yorkshire Post, New Statesman and many more.

Base Notes: 

With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature – the Northern working class.

This memoir chronicles a pre-internet smalltown England of the 1980s and 90s already fading from view. Here 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 is also gloriously, unapologetically alive – like Elena Ferrante in Thatcher’s Britain or a Billy Liar who finally gets on the train.

With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversation and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, Stripe swerves sentimentality as she journeys to London, New York and beyond. This is no cliched story of redemption and escape though, but rather a big-hearted tragi-comic exploration of family ties and the pursuit of creativity.

Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature out of a life less ordinary.


We look forward to seeing you. 

Catherine & Claire