West-Knights takes the tradition of the British family novel - with all its resentment, over-drinking and passive aggression - and transcends it: Deep Down is funny, sad, tender and hopeful. When Billie stays in Tom’s cramped garret, he recognises that she “sleeps as she always has, on her front, arms pinned behind her and her face squashed up by the pillow like someone being punched”. 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. 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.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.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that there are some really touching and relatable moments in this book.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! Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news.

Deep Down is something altogether darker; an examination of the legacy of abuse shot through with sharp wit and compassion. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. They are repairing the scenery, rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place. This perceptive account of the undercurrents that shape our family relationships and the ways in which they play out in adulthood had me gripped. 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.