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. 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.

This book has opened my eyes and made me realise to be grateful for who you have and what you have got. It wrestles, too, with the timeless question of how to form one's own distinct adult identity in the shadow of a difficult parent. 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. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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. Twentysomething siblings Billie and Tom are thrown together in Paris in the immediate aftermath of their father’s sudden death. Woozily wandering between the arrondissements, the siblings dodge tourists and tiptoe around each other’s feelings, awaiting news of funeral plans. Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news.

The only thing I would say (and it may well have been updated in the finished copies), was that it would’ve been helpful to have time frames detailed as it did jump around and you kind of had to guess when a flashback was etc. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there’s always been a distance to their relationship. Billie's chair screeches and she begins to pick up bits of a jar with a careful thumb and forefinger.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. The passage about how they used to try and make each other laugh in church particularly brought me back. Deep Down is something altogether darker; an examination of the legacy of abuse shot through with sharp wit and compassion. After their father’s sudden death in America, where he was living with his new wife, the pair come together.