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. 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? 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. Noemie and Wayne seemed to take away from our rather passive main characters.

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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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. Imogen West-Knights: I just love a conversation where people are talking but they’re not saying anything. And dancing around things, and how obvious that often is. Any family that I’ve spent a lot of time with is like that. In my family, my friends’ families, all of these families, you get used to knowing ‘oh, it’s not actually that they’re talking about, it’s that .’

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.” 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 asked Samuel why intentionality matters. “Having something to look forward to when you’re scared helps you manage all of the uncertainties,” she told me. “So if you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to give myself a luxury takeaway on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays I’m going to have an extra-long smelly bath,’ having that to look forward to helps lift your mood, both during those times and in the times in-between.”

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. 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. 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’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 don’t know what you’re crying for,’ a woman, seemingly unconnected to the victim, says. ‘She’s the one who should be crying.’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. I want to ask about the dark humour of the book. Because it is so funny, and so many people say this about grief, that there are so many ridiculous elements to the whole process. 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. 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.”