You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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”. Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. DEEP DOWN is a beautifully constructed and unnervingly assured debut which deeply moved and impressed me.

There are no histrionics here, nor any glib resolutions, but a superbly observed exploration of intimacy and its failings. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. The climax of the book is a visit by Tom and Billie, along with Tom’s workmates, to the Paris catacombs, in a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for the hero’s descent to the underworld to confront the monster.If we are going to be switching back and forth in timelines as well as between two perspectives, it would have been helpful to replace chapter numbers with character names instead. Perhaps what is bravest about the novel’s artfully inconclusive ending is the painful acceptance that, with grief, there may never be a clear way out into the light. What West-Knights does so effectively here is to make no distinction between past and present; incidents from childhood are related in the same continuous present tense as the current events in Paris, with nothing so clunky as dates or chapter headings to mark the switch.

West-Knights considers the oddities of modern life for people in their twenties and thirties – from sharing a rented flat with a girl who once threw ‘farewell drinks before going on a three-week holiday’, to endless obligatory debates about the best Tesco meal deal. Twentysomething siblings Billie and Tom are thrown together in Paris in the immediate aftermath of their father’s sudden death. What initially seem to be the hallmarks of any repressed family – an inability to discuss death; tensions between divorced parents; a repeated insistence that everyone is ‘fine’ – become, as the novel unfolds, something far more disconcerting. A sensitive look at grief, families, ambition, anger and the complexity of loving and hating someone all at once.This book has opened my eyes and made me realise to be grateful for who you have and what you have got. They put themselves in an unnecessary situation and it's hard for me to feel for them, for that reason. I would wager that West-Knights herself is a drama kid at heart and they should know that this idea is a little bit tired. One of the remarkable things about Deep Down is how finely attuned it is to the way grief is intimately tangled up with ridiculousness.

Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news. The novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable. In one finely wrought section during a family holiday to Spain, 13-year-old Tom is privy to an awful altercation between his parents in the supermarket. I found Tom’s story more compelling but maybe that’s just because I love Paris and can’t resist a bit of romance 🤷‍♀️ Together the siblings make for some uncomfortable reading, finding any reason to pick at each other and disagree until it all comes to a head in the catacombs (loved this little sidebar of the story, fascinating!A brilliant page-turner - I also wanted to pause every few paragraphs and read aloud as a treat for whoever happened to be sitting next to me. Both are drifting, distant from each other and their mother, until this death shakes to the foundation the defences they have built over the years against the violence of their family history. We learn, for instance, that when Queen Elizabeth II died, the state trumpeters were on a plane to Canada and the bearer party was in Iraq. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city.