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

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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. West-Knights is also skilful in her depiction of domestic abuse, rarely showing it directly; the potential for an outburst, and the way the children learn to recognise the warning signs, is more chilling than any description of a punch thrown.

I’m definitely categorising this one in the ‘sad girl reads’ section because it’s a pretty bleak and edgy take on family and grief. I just wish it was easier to follow and that we got to know the characters even better so that those moments held more weight. Deep Down is a wonderfully astute and often hilarious look at sibling relationships, intimacy and family repression.She was shortlisted for the Portobello Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Essay Prize 2018. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there’s always been a distance to their relationship. When the narrative loops back to the protagonists’ earlier lives, her observations of the nine to five are hilariously unforgiving: “At work, Billie spends most of her time with Martin, her direct superior, a lumpy man of about forty-five with back problems that he refers to as often as possible.

A sensitive look at grief, families, ambition, anger and the complexity of loving and hating someone all at once. Deep Down is something altogether darker; an examination of the legacy of abuse shot through with sharp wit and compassion. Anyone who knew of Imogen West-Knights as one half of the pitch-perfect satirical Twitter account Bougie London Literary Woman might have made assumptions about how her first novel would look: perhaps a smart, witty comedy skewering pretensions in the world of media or publishing. Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. It's valid that it all goes back to their upbringing and childhood but while we dug deeper, we didn't get to go broader.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. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there's always been a distance to their relationship. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Billie's chair screeches and she begins to pick up bits of a jar with a careful thumb and forefinger. Perhaps we could have used another character - like a sibling or a cousin - who has kept in touch with both siblings to help bridge the gap, and keep the action, communication, and tension between our main characters. West-Knights deftly shows us that the relationship between the siblings, and with their dad William, is anything but straightforward. 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. 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.Billie and her mother, Lisa, steadfastly refer to their father’s “illness”; it is left to Tom to voice the unsayable: “Maybe the only thing that was actually wrong with him was that he was a bad person. 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. They are repairing the scenery, rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place.

In prose with a spareness conveying the numbness of early bereavement, Deep Down shuttles between present and past, as well as between Tom and Billie’s very different but equally vulnerable perspectives.The characters are relatively interesting and seeing how their perspectives on their alcoholic father’s life diverge towards the end of the text provided good character development for both. The novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable.