And the novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable. 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. Our understanding of the characters is quite limited to their relationship and history with their father. 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.

Secondly, I think that the story could have used additional layers on top of the grief and resentment they were experiencing in the present day. I just wish it was easier to follow and that we got to know the characters even better so that those moments held more weight. 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.We see the book flit back to them as children and them now as they attempt to get their lives back on track. 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. 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.

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. This was quite an interesting read about a brother and sister coming to terms with the death of their abusive father. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.It should be a time to comfort each other, but there’s always been a distance to their relationship. Deep Down begins as Billie, a twentysomething Londoner, and her older brother Tom, a “failed actor” living in Paris, face unexpected news. They are repairing the scenery, rebuilding the set on which their performance of normal life takes place. 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.