Deep Cuts: A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “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

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM A24 • A BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Warm, nostalgic, totally engrossing. I loved this novel.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods

It was the love story of a decade. Or it should have been.

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 their instant chemistry kicks off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Will they ever take the leap beyond “just friends”? Or is their collaboration holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

As Percy and Joe circle each other from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of connection, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard by the people we love.