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. 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.

I couldn't believe this was a debut novel, it certainly pulled at my heart strings and bought reality back to life. 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. 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. Attention is directed to the complicated tenderness and shared history between them, existing regardless of an intractable awkwardness.After their father’s sudden death in America, where he was living with his new wife, the pair come together. DEEP DOWN is a beautifully constructed and unnervingly assured debut which deeply moved and impressed me. This is a tender story about families and how you need them to cope through some of the worse possible times of your lives.

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. She was shortlisted for the Portobello Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Essay Prize 2018. They are repairing the scenery, rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place. It wrestles, too, with the timeless question of how to form one's own distinct adult identity in the shadow of a difficult parent. And the novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable.

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. 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”). It should be a time to comfort each other, but there's always been a distance to their relationship.

They put themselves in an unnecessary situation and it's hard for me to feel for them, for that reason. 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. 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!There are scenes of ‘goo spattered all over the floor’, interrupted by a policeman ‘wearing a chunky black vest thing’, and dramatic arguments where the most tragic result is a lack of ice creams ‘in the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog’. Deep Down examines that which we would rather suppress - grief, shame, hurt - with unflinching verve while treading a careful line between finding the absurd in the humane, and the humane in the absurd.

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. There is a LOT of description of movement from one place to another, which I find absolutely exhausting as a reader. The passage about how they used to try and make each other laugh in church particularly brought me back.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.