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

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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. 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. Deep Down is a wonderfully astute and often hilarious look at sibling relationships, intimacy and family repression.

The passage about how they used to try and make each other laugh in church particularly brought me back. 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. If you like stories of family, friendship and the power of grief I certainly wouldn’t be saying no this novel! 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. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there’s always been a distance to their relationship.Such crispness could have given the narrative a slightly sneering edge, but West-Knights’ quiet focus on the vulnerability of her lead characters grounds the novel in a more humane place. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.

The narrative voice is fluent and assured, with an eye for detail and original images: a cup of tea is “crunchy with limescale”; clearing up after one of their father’s rages is “rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place”. 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 was potential for some interesting explorations on family dynamics, domestic violence and complicated grief, but that didn't happen here. 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. 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.

To be fair, I picked it up at a friend’s house but after 20 pages or so I literally threw it across the room. Tom starts to pick up the glass too, and the only sounds in the room are the gentle clink of tile on shard, and the rumbling of the kettle. 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. There is a LOT of description of movement from one place to another, which I find absolutely exhausting as a reader. The subterranean climax introduces a note of the uncanny that doesn’t quite convince, and the ending feels unresolved, though perhaps this is in keeping with the idea that the “möbius strip” of complex grief does not allow for tidy closure.

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. Woozily wandering between the arrondissements, the siblings dodge tourists and tiptoe around each other’s feelings, awaiting news of funeral plans. 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. The novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable.Tom and Billie’s memories, vivid with the clarity that childhood shame or fear can retain, are therefore presented with the same immediacy as the days of limbo between death and funeral. 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. 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.

Our understanding of the characters is quite limited to their relationship and history with their father. It wrestles, too, with the timeless question of how to form one's own distinct adult identity in the shadow of a difficult parent. I agree with one reviewer who said that the author is a 'human story- teller' but disagree that she is 'hilarious' as I didn't find much humour in the book.This was quite an interesting read about a brother and sister coming to terms with the death of their abusive father. 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. Billie, who has a ‘plain, mashed potato sort of face’, lives in London, while Tom (a failed actor, whose only success was in a Christmas advert) has moved to Paris to work in a bar. Millenials philosophising about mundane things while roaming around the streets of Paris and surviving on bread and water.