DEEP DOWN is a beautifully constructed and unnervingly assured debut which deeply moved and impressed me. Tom starts to pick up the glass too, and the only sounds in the room are the gentle clink of tile on shard, and the rumbling of the kettle. Twentysomething siblings Billie and Tom are thrown together in Paris in the immediate aftermath of their father’s sudden death. 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. 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 tension might have built up over years but considering they have been living their own lives, there was only really three days for everything to resurface. Billie's chair screeches and she begins to pick up bits of a jar with a careful thumb and forefinger.

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. This was quite an interesting read about a brother and sister coming to terms with the death of their abusive father. Billie and her mother, Lisa, steadfastly refer to their father’s “illness”; it is left to Tom to voice the unsayable: “Maybe the only thing that was actually wrong with him was that he was a bad person. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city.

Imogen West Knights reveals family silence and repression in a way which feels almost agonisingly true to life.

I couldn't believe this was a debut novel, it certainly pulled at my heart strings and bought reality back to life. A slow burn portrayal of how families can pull us apart but also how two siblings can find their way back to each other and to themselves.