Deep Down: the 'intimate, emotional and witty' 2023 debut you don't want to miss

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Why does someone do something? Because it’s easy to do,” Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist and author of a book about pleasure called Happiness by Design, tells me. Giving yourself constant treats is easier for people working from home, where you have frictionless access to online shopping and to the food in your fridge, with no judgment from colleagues. Drinking more is easier if you don’t have to show up to an in-person meeting at nine the next morning. I’m so sorry,’ Billie says to the flight attendant, desperate to endear herself to somebody, and he gives her a nod of professional neutrality. The woman appears to be bleeding. Billie stands with her eyes pinned to the floor and tries in vain to induce an out- of- body experience.

I was runner up in the Telegraph’s Cassandra Jardine Prize 2015, shortlisted for the Portobello Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Essay prize 2018. I was also shortlisted for the Freelance Writing Awards art and design writer of the year in 2021. Deep Down begins, in narrative terms, on an aeroplane, with Billie dropping her suitcase on an old woman’s head. Following the death of her father, flying out to Paris seemed the natural thing to do, and nobody should count on travelling by budget airline without accruing additional trauma en route. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. It’s the kind of detail on which Imogen West-Knights thrives. Characters are introduced with damning but throw-away assessments, such as Laura, “who once threw farewell drinks before going on a three-week holiday”, and Elle, “an accomplished university gymnast who is very good at finding ways to wedge the fact she is tiny into conversation”.

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That was something I really worried about with the dad, because by not having him there a lot of the time to speak for himself, I didn’t want him to end up being this uncomplicated baddie. The 55-year-old Heiny notwithstanding, it’s a clear if lazy pitch to the booming market for millennial fiction. This is West-Knights’s first novel, but the author has already achieved a cult following as Britain’s foremost millennial feature writer. Her articles on everything from the assassination of Olof Palme to a Gone Girl-themed cruise ship have a tendency to delight and disturb in equal measure, and the same is true of Deep Down. Imogen West-Knights: Yeah, and that’s another reason I didn’t want to focus too much on the violence between the mother and the father. I wanted that to be present enough that you felt it was real, but not the focus, because so much has been written about being the victim of this kind of abuse, and even being the perpetrator of this kind of abuse, but not so much about the collateral – especially children who grow up in the shadow of violence and what that might look like in their adulthood, and how they might carry that out into the world and into making their own adult relationships.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. I suppose it’s because, in a way, a lot of people feel a sibling should be like an ally in the fight against your parents. And often it doesn’t turn out that way – sometimes you’re on the same side and sometimes you’re not. I’m much more interested in sibling relationships where people are not best friends. I actually find it a bit creepy when they are. No offence, anyone! Communication issues are also central to the novel. It seems to spin around what’s on the surface, what’s being concealed and how to break through those barriers.But until they reach the catacombs, it’s all been a bit bathetic. After losing their friends in the tunnels, all they have is each other – something they’ve been avoiding, even when in close proximity, since coming of age. 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. I feel like you hint at the father’s violence, but it’s mostly quite hidden or off-stage. In lots of novels about abuse or trauma this can be more front-loaded, whereas here it feels less about the violence itself and more about how Billie and Tom respond to it.