Emma Brodie Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Emma Brodie is a packager, editor, and literary fiction novelist who is best known for her debut novel “Songs in Ursa Major.”

She got her start as a writer soon after graduating from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Brodie is also a faculty member at Catapult and contributes articles to HuffPost.
She has also worked in book publishing for more than a decade and has over the years published the works of many very well-known authors.

Some of the authors she has worked with include the likes of Emma Gray, Awkwafina, Deborah Hanekamp, Anna Drezen, Marleet Grace, and Nathan W. Pyle.

As an editor, she currently works at Voracious Imprint an imprint of Little Brown as executive editor, where she has acquired a variety of illustrated nonfiction works. She published her debut novel Songs in Ursa Major in 2021.
Brodie currently makes her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and their rambunctious dog.

The inspiration for her debut novel was the real-life romantic relationship between James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. Emma Brodie has always loved James Taylor’s novel “Can You Close Your Eyes,” the workhorse song.
The man loves to read the song on pretty much every encore or television appearance that he has done for more than five decades.

Emma particularly loved the recording of Carly Simon and Taylor, which they sang in the late 70s at their Martha’s Vineyard compound, about two years before they separated.

At the time, she assumed that he had penned the song about her. But then she read Carly Simon’s autobiography and realized that the work was several years old and had been intended for Joni Mitchell.
The revelation blew her mind since it was a song she had cherished and loved to listen to throughout her life. She realized that she did not know what it was about even though she always believed she did.
It was a disorienting experience given that her guidepost song which had been so fixated in her mind was not what she thought it was. It was akin to discovering that your parent lived a full life before you came to be while you believed otherwise.
But she took this realization to create space for imagination and creativity as she began writing her manuscript.

Emma Brodie has been lucky that her manuscript would become a blockbuster work that it is now being made into a film. She has also been selected to adapt the screenplay which she found to be a fascinating process.
She loved learning about scriptwriting as she had the opportunity to tell everything in her story that she once only had the opportunity to show when she was writing it as a fiction work.

Nonetheless, it was a huge learning curve as she still wanted to keep the spirit of the novel intact and tried as much as possible to keep the same characters, micro scenes, and even the emotional results.
Still, imagining the possibility of real actors playing the parts was a lot of motivation to level up and learn which was ultimately an amazing process.

“Songs in Ursa Major” is a work set in 1969 that features Jesse Reid whose name is all over the Bayleen Island Folk Fest. He is a soft spoken tall man with eyes bluer than stone-washed denim.

His supple baritone and intricate guitar riffs are about to take him from being famous to becoming a legend with a headlining performance. But on the way to the show, he crashes his motorcycle putting all his dreams in jeopardy.
On the other hand, is Bayleen Island local Jane Quinn, who is known for her long blond hair and naturally flowing music. She and her bandmates are over the moon when they are requested to play at the festival in place of Jesse Reid.
Jane and her band go on to take over the stage to deliver an electrifying performance that announces the birth of a star.

Jesse is living on the island recovering from what was a near-fatal accident, even as he makes friends with Jane and coaches her as she produces her first record.

As she contends with the sexism in the music industry, he becomes her advocate and what had been a shared calling in music soon turns into a passionate love affair.

Touring with Jesse, Jane is fascinated with the media attention, the giant stadiums, the wild parties, and the late nights that she is shocked when she discovers the dark secret behind Jesse’s music.
With nowhere to run, she needs to deal with ghosts from her own past resulting in an iconic album.