"For anyone who loved High Fidelity and wants a woman's perspective on the early aughts music scene, Deep Cuts is both a love story between two people whose timing is always off, and a love letter to the thing that moves all of us-music"--
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • TODAY SHOW SPRING PICK
“Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song, Deep Cuts is both a romp into the indie sleaze era of the early aughts and a timeless love story.”—Coco Mellors, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Sisters
“Deep Cuts will live alongside all the unforgettable music that Holly writes about so beautifully, with her whole heart.”—Cameron Crowe, Academy Award–winning writer/director of Almost Famous
Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
“This is so good it makes me want to puke.”—Haley Pham
“Permit me a confession. As a music lover, I collect definitive listening experiences. The DLE is that rare moment when a song so exquisitely captures a time or a person or a feeling that it stakes a forever-claim in your heart. Years later, that exact feeling can return like an emotional landslide, in a single chord. It’s the great gift of music, or in this wonderful case—Holly Brickely’s Deep Cuts. It’ll forever transport me to a time in late-winter, the fog on the San Francisco Bay, and the gift of these funny, deep-feeling characters I never want to leave behind. Deep Cuts is my latest treasured DLE, in book form, and it will live alongside all the unforgettable music that Holly writes about so beautifully, with her whole heart.”—Cameron Crowe, Academy Award–winning filmmaker and journalist
“A captivating love letter to the early aughts and the era of ‘indie sleaze.’ At its heart is the story of Percy and Joe—a tale of love, art, and the complications that lie between. But beyond their relationship, Deep Cuts delves into the raw, relatable realities of artistic ambition, toxic dynamics, and the complexity of growing up.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, TODAY
“It’s perhaps inevitable that Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts will be likened to other noteworthy (feeble pun intended) books that incorporate music—most recently Daisy Jones and the Six, possibly High Fidelity, etc. What could have been a straight-up romance turns into something far more interesting.”—The Minnesota Star Tribune
“[R]ock novels are historically lame. Or a reboot of truth . . . But something brand new, that encompasses the reality and truth of being a music fan? I’m not sure any book exists that nails it as well as Deep Cuts.”—Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter
“[D]azzling.”—Booklist, starred review
“It’s a banger.”—Publishers Weekly
“This is rich, immersive, and transportive storytelling, full of Walkmans and CD folders, love and yearnings (oh, is there yearning), and exceptional music writing. Songs and lyrics become charged with meaning as the characters use music to understand themselves and each other, and the result is breathtaking.”—The Bookseller, “Book of the Month” (UK)
“Smart, sensitive, and assured, Deep Cuts tells us as much about the hearts of its music-loving characters as it does about music’s power to distill overwhelming feelings into indelible art.”—Peter Ames Carlin, New York Times bestselling author of Bruce and The Name of This Band is R.E.M.
“I absolutely loved Deep Cuts—clever and heart-wrenching and addictive, the kind of novel that grabs you in an instant and takes you reeling through its pages.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Paper Palace
“I find it hard to remember the last time I found a novel so relatable and enjoyable. Prepare to fall in love with Percy and Joe this spring.”—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Holly Brickley studied English at UC Berkeley and received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Originally from Hope, British Columbia, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and their two daughters. Deep Cuts is her first novel.
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