I feel like I've been waiting to read this book for the last 20 years! As a uni student during the Brit Pop years I LOVED all the nostalgic references, I LOVED all the in depth music conversation (and strong opinions!), I LOVED the ever-changing relationships between Percy, Joe, Zoe and all the others who entered and left their lives through the years, and most of all I LOVED how it showed how music can be one of the most defining influences in our lives, loves and relationships. Occasionally the pace felt a little off, sometimes too lethargic, sometimes racing too fast but that is just the smallest of niggles as there is so much heart woven throughout that more than made up for it. Surely this is going to be one of THE books of 2026!

I loved it so much I started a Substack just because I wanted to write about it.

Do you ever read a book and fall so deeply in love with it that you don’t want it to end? But you also desperately want to know what happens. So, you end up reading it slowly, finding any excuse not to finish it.
That feeling mirrors the plot of Deep Cuts itself. You know Percy and Joey have a connection — many connections, really: physical, sexual, emotional, musical, intellectual — and yet they never quite manage to connect in all the right ways at the same time.
Deep Cuts is a love story spanning from California to New York and back again. It’s also a time capsule of music from 2000 to today.
The novel begins in the year 2000, when the characters are university students. That makes them roughly the same age as me, a coincidence that made the story resonate in a quietly emotional way. So much of the music they discover and discuss is music I was discovering too — although I was doing so in the far less gritty and glamorous setting of North Wales.
Many of the same songs soundtracked my nights out and nights in, my friendships and my romances.
Alongside the familiar, I also discovered songs and artists I’d somehow missed the first time around. Revisiting old tracks has been like meeting old friends, while finding new ones has felt like making new ones.
The theme of Storytelling Week 2026 is “Soundtrack to Your Life,” and this book turned out to be a serendipitously perfect fit. It made me think about how closely stories and songs intertwine. We don’t just remember chapters of our lives by dates or places, but by what we were listening to at the time. A song can hold an entire version of you inside it.
There’s also something wonderful about being able to jump straight from the page to the music itself. Many users of Apple Music and Spotify have created playlists featuring every song mentioned in the book and following along while reading feels like having a soundtrack in real time — like the story is playing in your headphones as well as on the page.
It’s made me appreciate just how easy it is to find music now. I’m old enough to remember when you could hear a song on the radio, on TV, or drifting out of a shop doorway and fall in love with it — and then never hear it again. Unless you were lucky enough to stumble across it by chance, it simply disappeared, half-remembered and unreachable. You carried it around in your head, hoping one day it would return to you.
Now, an entire musical history lives in our pockets. A few seconds of sound can unlock a title, an artist, and a whole catalogue. We don’t lose songs anymore — we collect them, save them, build playlists around them. Reading Deep Cuts alongside its soundtrack has felt like a perfect meeting of past and present: the nostalgia of remembering how music once slipped through our fingers, and the quiet miracle of being able to hold it all, instantly, in our hands.

Back to the book, I’m buying it it hardback, paperback, audiobook, I’m going to leave it on park benches and on pub stools, you get the idea….