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. 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.

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 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. 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. What the hell is the matter with you?’ he asks, and she hears his question echoed in mutters by the other passengers. 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.The 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. Again, from a personal standpoint, the acting school trope is very much overdone at this stage. I would wager that West-Knights herself is a drama kid at heart and they should know that this idea is a little bit tired. Even if Tom had been a failed drama student but had some sort of redemption in this regard the constant poking at his degree may have felt slightly less like deja vu. 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? I made a halfhearted attempt to justify why I was watching trashy reality TV. She did the same about her ­midweek takeaway. Sure, she didn’t need one, but she was stressed by the upheaval and, anyway, she’d been getting midweek takeaways pretty often since the pandemic began. “It’s treat brain,” she said, shrugging. The narrative voice is fluent and assured, with an eye for detail and original images: a cup of tea is “crunchy with limescale”; clearing up after one of their father’s rages is “rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place”. 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. But Deep Down is an accomplished debut from a writer who is equally adept at handling comedy and tragedy, and the blurred edges between the two.

Such crispness could have given the narrative a slightly sneering edge, but West-Knights’ quiet focus on the vulnerability of her lead characters grounds the novel in a more humane place. There are poignant glimpses into how the young Tom and Billie coped with their father’s aggression. In one finely wrought section during a family holiday to Spain, 13-year-old Tom is privy to an awful altercation between his parents in the supermarket. While tempers escalate, all Tom wants are “ice creams in the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog … Not only do they look awesome but he imagines they probably turn your tongue and lips blue, which will be a lot of fun because he can lie on the ground and pretend that he’s died.”But I’ve always been really fascinated by that thing that happens in families where two people react totally differently to the same event. 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? Noel Bell, a psychotherapist, says the pandemic has also shifted our perception of what is a need versus what is an indulgence. A home exercise bike before the pandemic: an indulgence. During the pandemic: perhaps closer to a need. The press release accompanying Deep Down touts it as “perfect for fans of Naoise Dolan, Katherine Heiny and Megan Nolan”.

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. Healing can come through accepting each other’s flaws, and through coming to terms with the fact that repression is sometimes a necessity.

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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. Imogen West-Knights: I think this has been in the ether a bit, the question of what you own or don’t own as a writer. I think you can basically fictionalise everything, but I would say that because I write fiction. 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.

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.” But not everyone responded in the same way. “It’s remarkably variable across the population,” Delaney says. There are a large number of people for whom the arrival of Covid-19 meant loss of income or a more punishing work schedule, so they had less time or money to ­fritter away on extravagances. And there are people who have been using the pandemic as an opportunity to save. 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. As Hettie O’Brien wrote in The Baffler magazine last year, on the flip side the pandemic has triggered a surge in the popularity of a kind of neo-Stoicism. Articles about how our benighted age is the perfect moment for the Stoic idea that self-control will save us are rather common. They usually suggest weathering the pandemic storm without caving in to vices will bestow a better, more noble kind of existence than people haemorrhaging cash on pastries.I felt that the violence and the aggression would be more effective the less I said about it. There’s a scene where the dad spits at the mum in a supermarket. You only need that to happen one time to understand. One spit in the supermarket can say a lot more than eight scenes where someone is getting beaten up, you know? She reads it twice, and wonders why he doesn’t just say 10 if he means 10, then hopes it isn’t a typo for 12. I loved how you depicted Billie and Tom’s relationships with other people. In Tom’s relationship with Nour, he’s terrified of his own anger and seems to suppress his emotions because he’s so afraid anger will be his reaction to things. While in Billie’s relationship with Angus, she reacts to a fear her identity might disappear. So in both, there’s an anxiety about reproducing a dynamic that’s damaged them.