A love story about two people pulled apart by the same force that draws them together: music.

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 set Joe on a path to indie-rock stardom. But it also bruises Joe’s ego, and traps Percy in a role she resents. How long can Percy ignore the roars of her heart, and of her own unique talent, to protect their thrilling collaboration?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dancefloors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.

Holly Brickley's profile page

Holly Brickley is originally from Hope, British Columbia. She studied English at UC Berkeley and received an MFA from Columbia University. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two daughters. Deep Cuts is her first novel.

"Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song, Deep Cuts is both a nostalgic romp into the indie sleaze era of the early aughts and a timeless love story of creative collaboration, competition, and ambition." —Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Blue Sisters

"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

"Deep Cuts is an incredibly special book, one of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Moving, beautiful, rich with emotion, it’s an epic love story and the story of a woman finding her creative power, all rolled into one. Extraordinary.” —Beth O’Leary, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Flatshare and The Switch