SOURCE: "Family Secrets," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 16, October 23, 1997, pp. 54-5.

In the following review, Flanagan establishes the literary and cultural contexts of Reading in the Dark, comparing the novel to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and providing a historical background to Derry and its environs.

On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence.

It was a short staircase, fourteen steps in all, covered in lino from which the original pattern had been polished away to the point where it had the look of a faint memory. Eleven steps took you to the turn of the stairs where the cathedral and the sky always hung in the window frame. Three more steps took you on to the landing, about six feet long.

"Don't move," my mother said from the landing. "Don't cross that window."

I was...