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. The passage about how they used to try and make each other laugh in church particularly brought me back. Perhaps we could have used another character - like a sibling or a cousin - who has kept in touch with both siblings to help bridge the gap, and keep the action, communication, and tension between our main characters. 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. They are repairing the scenery, rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place.

For me, the highlights of this book were the Paris location and the friends and family who surround Billie and Tom - they brought joy and lightness where there wasn’t much. I couldn't believe this was a debut novel, it certainly pulled at my heart strings and bought reality back to life. Imogen West Knights reveals family silence and repression in a way which feels almost agonisingly true to life.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. 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. Deep Down is a wonderfully astute and often hilarious look at sibling relationships, intimacy and family repression. A sensitive look at grief, families, ambition, anger and the complexity of loving and hating someone all at once. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

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.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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Woozily wandering between the arrondissements, the siblings dodge tourists and tiptoe around each other’s feelings, awaiting news of funeral plans.

Imogen handles complicated family dynamics and the unspoken things that come between us with remarkable sensitivity and insight, as well as perfect dark humour that is so much a part of navigating grief. 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.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 wrestles, too, with the timeless question of how to form one’s own distinct adult identity in the shadow of a difficult parent. There was potential for some interesting explorations on family dynamics, domestic violence and complicated grief, but that didn't happen here. 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.