Deep Cuts: A Novel by Holly Brickley

“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.

REVIEWS

“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

“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

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 978-0593799086
Pages: 288