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

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Here, finally, was a term for the mindset I had noticed myself slipping into over the past 18 months. Before coronavirus, I had relatively good impulse control. I would treat myself to an unhealthy meal or a lazy afternoon or a new pair of trousers, but only occasionally. 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”. I think it’s so interesting the way that traumatic things can seem to either drive people very close, or completely apart. Why does that happen? And what would it look like if you tried to renegotiate it – how do you try to fix stuff that’s so deep seated?” I feel like you have that absurdist quality in your journalism too, and are drawn to things that are quite bizarre or being put in weird situations. Did you approach fiction in a similar way to your journalistic writing? Imogen West-Knights: I think that feels true to me about trauma, and about abuse. Most of your life you live not during the traumatic event, but in the aftermath of it, and you’re dealing with the way it ricochets into the rest of your life.

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. However, things have now opened up. And while the mood swings and teariness are gone, treat brain persists. For lots of people I spoke to, the same was true. Why hasn’t it gone away? Is that a problem, or not? “We’re still depleted from repetitively doing the same thing all the time,” says Samuel, “so I think treats still feel very exciting.”Imogen West-Knights: It was important to me to show that in a way that was different for each of them, but also the same. Again, it’s the same input, but then the way you react to it is completely different. Tom, he does go into relationships and does seek that love from someone, but then fears what he might inflict on that person because of who he thinks he is. Whereas Billie is much more like, ‘no, not going to go there, because I could replicate that same dynamic where someone needs a lot of care and I’m just going to vanish’. Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. What West-Knights does so effectively here is to make no distinction between past and present; incidents from childhood are related in the same continuous present tense as the current events in Paris, with nothing so clunky as dates or chapter headings to mark the switch. Tom and Billie’s memories, vivid with the clarity that childhood shame or fear can retain, are therefore presented with the same immediacy as the days of limbo between death and funeral. West-Knights is also skilful in her depiction of domestic abuse, rarely showing it directly; the potential for an outburst, and the way the children learn to recognise the warning signs, is more chilling than any description of a punch thrown. 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.

After recent years you don't need us to tell you that infectious diseases have the power to change history, but in Jon Kennedy's forthcoming book he makes the case for how they have in fact shaped humanity at every stage of history. Kennedy, a director at Barts hospital and the London Medical School, makes a compelling case for this thesis in his book, Pathogenesis. From the first success of Homo sapiens to the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam, Kennedy takes us on a long and winding tour of humankind's health record. Who Gets Believed by Dina NayeriThe characters are relatively interesting and seeing how their perspectives on their alcoholic father’s life diverge towards the end of the text provided good character development for both. The premise of Imogen West-Knights’ debut is rich with emotive potential. Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news. Their father has died suddenly. The “frighteningly unfamiliar territory” of grief opens before them. These estranged siblings decide they need to be together, and so Billie flies to France. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Conflicting feelings about this particular one! An interesting concept and some nice ideas throughout. As I’ll mention, I think my 3 star rating simply comes from some of my own personal preferences. I think anyone would be happy with a novel like this as a debut. Imogen West-Knights: That's something I’m interested in generally and always have been; this notion of good and bad people. I’ve always felt there is no such thing. A lot of people get hung up on this idea of being a good person, rather than being a person who does good things sometimes and bad things at other times. It was important to me that no character came out as this perfect saint or perfect villain.

This spartan, ill- decorated room makes Billie think of her brother as young, which is not something she’s used to doing. Four years older than her, his age has always seemed massive, almost stately. Now, though, she looks at where he lives and recognises that they’re at more or less the same stage of life, trudging through the featureless landscape of being twenty- something. It’s a strange, un- mooring sensation. Billie and Tom have just lost their father. It should be a time to comfort each other, but there's always been a distance to their relationship. Determined to change this, Billie boards a flight to her brother in Paris.

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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 nature of monsters is a subtle thread running through the novel. 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.” These treats can act as a temporary band-aid over a deeper need. When we are very tired — say, because we’re juggling homeschooling and a job — what we might really need is more sleep. But if we can’t get it, a more easily available source of comfort might be chocolate or wine. I am a writer and freelance journalist based in London. I write about culture, politics and the climate, and have pieces published in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Slate, ArtReview, the Times Literary Supplement, the i paper, the Times, Vice, the Economist’s 1843 magazine, Port magazine, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, Little White Lies, and Another Gaze. 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.

But what is a real feeling? If I have reached a tolerable level of peace, why does it matter what caused that peace? Is feeling well because of medication significantly different from feeling well because you ate some chocolate? Elements of my character I used to think of as my personality are gone: intense sentimentality, worrying about everything, moroseness. So what is personality, and what is symptom? I don’t think, for all society’s talk about acceptance of mental health conditions, it is ever going to be possible to draw a line between those two things. Symptoms of what, exactly? And what is a personality anyway? Are you the things you like? The company you keep? Your private fears? A product of childhood experiences? A balance of hormones? What am I responsible for, and what am I not? Tom follows the path of one raindrop, slithering down the window beside him, gathering speed and size as it races towards the bottom to vanish into the rest of the water settled there,” she writes. For interspersed among the ironised observational comedies are far darker episodes, dealing with Billie and Tom’s childhood, and the mysterious illness and violence of their father. Their mother, aunt and stepmother all have issues of their own, but as is so often the case in real life, we are frequently left guessing. When Billie emerges out into the city, she finds it humming with early evening energy. There is something alive in the air that makes her exhaustion more acute by contrast. She feels conspicuous on the walk to the flat, scrutinising the directions with her phone held out in front of her and pursued by the growl of her suitcase wheels.Billie’s dad has died and she’s just dropped her suitcase on an old woman’s head. Guilty, embarrassed, in tears, and trapped on the tarmac of Paris’ airport, this is how we first meet Billie – one of the two central characters of Imogen West-Knights’s debut novel Deep Down . The other is Billie’s brother, Tom, who she is staying with in the immediate aftermath of their father’s death. Pivoting between Billie and Tom’s perspectives, the novel follows each sibling as they attempt to bridge the emotional gulf between them while grappling with differing responses to their dad’s death, and how his past actions continue to haunt them. 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. The whole notion of the monster was interesting to me because I wanted there to be just enough ambiguity about the story to think, who’s the monster? The dad is the monster but Tom is worried he’s the monster. Deep Down is a novel about discovery, after all, but not in the way you’d expect. The greatest truth, it seems to say, is that of inadequacy.