Deep Cuts

A Novel

De: Holly Brickley

Narrado por: Jayme Mattler

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“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.

Every chapter is its own song on the album Percy was living

I love this book for the way it shows you that music touches every person in a different way. When you find someone that is touched the same way as you when they hear that lyric, you hold on to them. Fantastic.

Amazing for the music lover

Perfectly captures the music scene in early 2000s and on… made me so nostalgic about burned cds and then iPods.. also a REALISTIC romance and journey of friendships!

Slow Burn

No real resolution no evidence plot. I really don’t understand what the hype was about this.

A love story to early millennials

The book made my heart swell in all the ways. It made me miss being in college in the early 2000s…when figuring out who we were while it felt like the world was crumbling around us was a wild experience. I loved that Percy and Joe were so real and relatable. I just wish we could have had more of their story once finally taking the scary step toward “together” but I loved working through life with them to make it so that their timing was finally right.

Fabulous, can't wait to see the movie!

As a former work colleague of Holly’s, I came to this book not just as a reader, but as someone who lived through "some version" of "some of the story". That made the experience uniquely thrilling — like stumbling across a snapshot of your own past, only slightly reimagined. The book carries the aura of truth around her job — not a literal record of events, but a story reimagined with details so vivid and grounded in reality that each moment feels like it could have happened — even if it didn’t happen exactly that way.

Even back then, I sensed that Holly had a rare and uncanny gift for reading the culture around her. She noticed what others missed. This book proves it. She captures the early 2000s with striking clarity: the soundtracks, clothes, fluid friendships, emerging openness around sex and identity, and so much more. But she doesn’t just depict that era — she captures the feelings and angst around coming of age that many, regardless of their generation, can relate to.

Reading "Deep Cuts" brought back memories I didn’t know were still so vivid. I can’t wait to see the movie, and read everything else she writes and shares with the world.