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Holly Brickley, author of Deep Cuts

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?

Week of March 2, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of March 2nd include THE QUEENS OF CRIME by Marie Benedict, a thrilling story of the five greatest female writers of the Golden Age of Mystery and their bid to solve a real-life murder; THE MAID'S SECRET, an intriguing and heartwarming novel from Nita Prose in which a daring art heist on the eve of Molly Gray’s wedding reveals long-buried secrets; THE SOUL OF A WOMAN, Isabel Allende's passionate and inspiring meditation on what it means to be a woman; Patti Callahan Henry's THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND, the sweeping story of a legendary book, a lost mother, and a daughter’s search for them both; and TRAVELING, in which celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself.