Deep Down: the 'intimate, emotional and witty' 2023 debut you don't want to miss

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The story is about Tom and Billie, they have both had a bereavement in the family and seeing as they both are so far away from each other they decide to reconnect and hope that being together will help with the grief. For me, the highlights of this book were the Paris location and the friends and family who surround Billie and Tom - they brought joy and lightness where there wasn’t much. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Tom, the elder, is working there in an English-themed pub, avoiding the failure of his acting career (“not knowing what he is doing in Paris feels more productive than not knowing at home”).

This was quite an interesting read about a brother and sister coming to terms with the death of their abusive father. Funny, moving and unexpected, DEEP DOWN is an empathetic and hard-hitting look at both the struggles and the joys of sibling relationships, and the realities of grieving the loss of someone who was already an absence. West-Knights deftly shows us that the relationship between the siblings, and with their dad William, is anything but straightforward. A slow burn portrayal of how families can pull us apart but also how two siblings can find their way back to each other and to themselves.

As the setting for the climax of Imogen West-Knights’s subtle and compelling debut Deep Down, it is certainly fitting: in the wake of their father William’s death, the siblings begin to explore hidden and submerged memories from their childhood. Imogen handles complicated family dynamics and the unspoken things that come between us with remarkable sensitivity and insight, as well as perfect dark humour that is so much a part of navigating grief. Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. When Billie stays in Tom’s cramped garret, he recognises that she “sleeps as she always has, on her front, arms pinned behind her and her face squashed up by the pillow like someone being punched”. This perceptive account of the undercurrents that shape our family relationships and the ways in which they play out in adulthood had me gripped.

There was potential for some interesting explorations on family dynamics, domestic violence and complicated grief, but that didn't happen here.When their explorations lead them to the infamous Paris catacombs, they will finally be forced to face the secrets lurking in their past that illuminate the questions in their present. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there’s always been a distance to their relationship.

Even if Tom had been a failed drama student but had some sort of redemption in this regard the constant poking at his degree may have felt slightly less like deja vu.There are no histrionics here, nor any glib resolutions, but a superbly observed exploration of intimacy and its failings.