There is a LOT of description of movement from one place to another, which I find absolutely exhausting as a reader. 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. Billie and Tom are not necessarily likeable characters, but as the story progresses with flashbacks to their childhood we start to understand why they’re a bit messed up and have such a tense relationship - they’ve both processed their father’s behaviour in a different way and are therefore handling his loss differently too. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. Secondly, I think that the story could have used additional layers on top of the grief and resentment they were experiencing in the present day. We see the book flit back to them as children and them now as they attempt to get their lives back on track. 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. 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.

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.

DEEP DOWN is a beautifully constructed and unnervingly assured debut which deeply moved and impressed me.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. I think if these lengthy descriptions of inane journeys had instead been used as deep dives into character psyches I would have felt more connected to Billie and Tom. 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. The withholding of information is masterfully sustained as we come to understand why they have responded to their father’s death with such profound ambiguity. 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.