West-Knights considers the oddities of modern life for people in their twenties and thirties – from sharing a rented flat with a girl who once threw ‘farewell drinks before going on a three-week holiday’, to endless obligatory debates about the best Tesco meal deal.

This book has opened my eyes and made me realise to be grateful for who you have and what you have got.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. Attention is directed to the complicated tenderness and shared history between them, existing regardless of an intractable awkwardness. 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. Tom, the elder, is working there in an English-themed pub, avoiding the failure of his acting career (“not knowing what he is doing in Paris feels more productive than not knowing at home”).

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The only thing I would say (and it may well have been updated in the finished copies), was that it would’ve been helpful to have time frames detailed as it did jump around and you kind of had to guess when a flashback was etc. 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. Some of the feelings around loss were recognisable and easy to relate to, but this is different in a lot of ways because of their past.

Intermittent scenes show episodes from this history that allow the reader glimpses of the threat that shadowed Tom and Billie through childhood. This perceptive account of the undercurrents that shape our family relationships and the ways in which they play out in adulthood had me gripped. 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.