Deep Cuts

A Novel

By: Holly Brickley

Narrated by: Jayme Mattler

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.

©2025 Holly Brickley (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

“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

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!

Checks all the boxes

Seems that new books follow a check list. 1. Corporate/capitalism. Bad. 2. Republicans are the cause of society's ills. 3. Token lesbian 4. Casual sex. It just left me wishing for more...and less.

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.

A Perfect Playlist for Growing Up

This book starts with the slightly cringe angst so many of us felt starting out in college at the beginning of the century - needy to prove ourselves. Then it unfolds, layer after layer, digging deeper, taking new perspectives, telling us things about ourselves while the narrator remembers discovering them for the first time. This story is a reflection on what it means to live and to forgive and to find one's place in a world that is constantly struggling to find it's own identity right along with us. And through the entire story, a complex and varied, personal and beautiful Playlist provides an array of lenses to view it all through. Like growing and the best songs - it's messy and painful and beautiful all at once. I loved it.

Great Story will be a awesome Movie

Very indicative of the times….Holly Brickley is a very talented writer….the reader was very enjoyable

A melomaniac’s dream

A novel full of music, youth and everything 20-somethings go through. It’s actually a great debut, enjoyed it very much.

Boring and drawn out

DNF.
Don’t waste your credits, I’m amazed this has the high rating it does. Authors perspective of music in the late 90s doesn’t make for a good book.