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

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She said: “Having an editor as sharp as Rhiannon to work on my book with is more than I could ever have hoped for when I began writing it. I’m so excited, and so grateful to my wonderful agent and friend Kat Aitken for believing that I could get here.” Billie and her brother Tom have both, in their own ways, sought to find themselves and come to terms with family trauma in the French capital. 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. If those two entries describe a crisis of the self, being on sertraline has prompted another, lesser one. I really like being on antidepressants. They work well for me. The only problem now is that I have a different distrust of my feelings. If I feel an unfamiliar calm about anything: work deadlines, friends going through hard times, missteps in my love life, the first thought is: is this real?

The press release accompanying Deep Down touts it as “perfect for fans of Naoise Dolan, Katherine Heiny and Megan Nolan”. 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. I ask Samuel what advice she would give anyone trying to undo some of their treat-brain behaviour. She cites the work of Stanford University behavioural scientist BJ Fogg: “You get big results from tiny habits. So if your treat was, ‘I deserve a drink every night,’ initially, just have one six nights instead of seven. You successfully change habits not by willpower, but by feeling good about having changed your habit. So if you set yourself a target that feels small and manageable, you then feel pleased that you’ve done it, and you’re much more likely to build on it.”Healing can come through accepting each other’s flaws, and through coming to terms with the fact that repression is sometimes a necessity. 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.

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. 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?”A human’s subterranean mirror image, like that of a city, promises transformation – but more often than not, we realise that our greatest discoveries were always there above ground, before our very eyes. Billie later “knows that neither of them have the energy to explain exactly what they’re sorry for”, but they have, at least, finally felt each other’s hurt as well as their own.

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. Sad things are funny and that makes them sadder – to me anyway. Life doesn’t stop, it just carries on being kind of ridiculous.What the hell is the matter with you?’ he asks, and she hears his question echoed in mutters by the other passengers. 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? Tom’s ex-girlfriend Nour writes a short story and at first, it’s introduced by another character reading it and saying she’s “bored with stories like that”, stories about “monsters”. Later you learn she’s fictionalised an event from Tom’s life, without his permission. What do you think about the idea of monstrosity and the ethics of using someone else’s story? 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.

I’m sorry,’ Billie tries one more time, this apology for the crying as much as the woman’s head. ‘My dad just died.’ 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. 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.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. Dazed by grief, the siblings spend days wandering the streets, both helping and hurting each other in the process. When their explorations lead them to the infamous Paris catacombs, they will finally be forced to face the secrets lurking in their past that illuminate the questions in their present. Billie herself is haunted by her father’s ghost and that of her namesake, the actress Billie Whitelaw, who in later life could occasionally be found hoovering the stairs of a terraced house in NW5’s Spencer Rise.