[2] The novel starts with Matt reciting recollections from his childhood, where he blatantly states that he is not a nice person and has not dealt with pain since scraping his knee at the age of nine.

He was committed there by his parents, Richard and Susan, after his grandmother found him attempting to make a giant ant farm in his flat, which a hallucination of Simon told him to do.

One of Matt's therapists asks him to perform a genogram – which eventually makes him remember what happened to Simon by writing about the night he died.

Nathan Filer, who grew up in Bristol, first had the idea for his first novel, The Shock of the Fall, when he was training to be a mental health nurse in 2002.

[6] The idea of the central character of Matthew arrived in his head as he was walking home after a shift on an acute psychiatric ward.

[7] In 2004 Filer completed his degree in mental health nursing, and in 2007 moved into academia as a research assistant — where he looked into treatments for depression.

[3] The British Journal of Psychiatry noted that readers who are psychiatrists hoping to find themselves portrayed within the work would be disappointed, as they are "mentioned less than a handful of times throughout".

[8] The London Review of Books praises Filer's skillful interweaving of time frames and his "impressive feat of storytelling".