The narrator's mother sees a ghost on the stairs and warns her young son not to come up.

The narrator's uncles gather to fix the family boiler and share stories about Uncle Eddie's mysterious disappearance after a distillery shoot-out.

The narrator, his father, and brother Liam are taken to a police station and beaten after a gun is found in their home.

At Aunt Ena's funeral, the narrator overhears strangers discussing Uncle Eddie and presses his mother for details, but she evades him.

Sergeant Burke pressures the narrator into confirming the names of boys present when a rock was thrown at a police car.

The narrator's father berates him for giving names to the police, calling it a shameful betrayal of the family and community.

The narrator's grandfather falls ill, and the narrator is sent to stay with Aunt Katie to help care for him.

The narrator's grandfather confesses on his deathbed that he ordered Uncle Eddie's execution, believing Eddie was a police informant, but Eddie was innocent.

The narrator's mother visits her dying father, who appears to confess the truth about Eddie to her before dying two days later.

The narrator's mother suffers a mental breakdown after confronting her father's death and the revelation about Eddie's wrongful execution.

Crazy Joe tells the narrator that he witnessed Tony McIlhenny stepping out of Sergeant Burke's police car as a paid informant.

The narrator writes the story of Eddie's murder in Irish and reads it aloud to his parents, pretending it is a school essay.

Sergeant Burke visits the narrator's mother and admits he deliberately spread false rumors about Eddie being an informant to avenge a murdered policeman.

The narrator leaves Derry to attend university in Belfast and earns the highest possible final grade in his studies.

The narrator's father dies after a second heart attack, and his mother, permanently silenced by a stroke, is sealed in her silence forever.

The novel follows an unnamed narrator growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland, whose family harbors a devastating secret about his Uncle Eddie, who vanished in the 1920s. From early clashes with the police to his grandfather's deathbed confession, the narrator gradually uncovers that Eddie was wrongfully executed on the orders of his own grandfather. The truth — that Tony McIlhenny, not Eddie, was the real police informant — emerges too late to heal anyone it touches. The narrator's mother suffers a breakdown after confronting the revelation, and the family's silence only deepens. Through Crazy Joe's eyewitness account and Sergeant Burke's eventual confession, the full story finally surfaces, but no catharsis follows. The narrator leaves for university as his parents die one by one, their secrets buried with them.

The central mystery of Uncle Eddie's death and its toll on the family.

The narrator watches a magician named Mr. Bamboozelem make a series of objects disappear before vanishing himself at Duffy Circus.

The narrator's sister Una is carried out of the family home on a stretcher with meningitis and later dies in hospital.

The narrator visits Una's grave to leave flowers and sees a vision of Una walking toward him down the cemetery path.

The narrator reads his first novel, The Shan Van Vocht, about the 1798 rebellion, and becomes deeply absorbed in its characters and plot.

Brother Regan reads aloud a student essay that captures the style of storytelling common at the narrator's own family dinner table.

The narrator's father recalls how Uncle Eddie's sudden departure left him, aged twelve, alone to lead and support their struggling family.

The narrator and his brother Liam climb to the ancient fort at Grianan and gaze down at Donegal spread out below.

The narrator's family visits Buncrana on holiday, and the narrator walks with his father and Liam to see the Field of the Disappeared.

Aunt Katie tells the children the story of Brigid McLaughlin and two orphaned children who are gradually possessed by a supernatural force.

The narrator tears up and destroys the family's rosebushes in the backyard as a silent act of defiance against his father.

The narrator formally apologizes to Sergeant Burke at the police barracks with Father O'Neill present, restoring his standing in the community.

The narrator's dying grandfather reveals that Uncle Constantine died a heretic, contradicting the family's insistence that he returned to the Church.

Father Nugent gives the narrator a Catholic school sex education talk, explaining the act in guarded, moralistic, and Latin-inflected terms.

The narrator holds hands with Irene Mackey at the cinema, and her boyfriend Greneghan hits the narrator after seeing them kiss outside.

Aunt Katie reveals to the narrator that his mother once dated Tony McIlhenny before Tony left the narrator's mother for Katie.

Alongside the central mystery, the narrator's childhood is shaped by grief, folklore, and the small dramas of community life in Derry. The deaths of his sister Una and Aunt Ena leave early marks on him, while folk tales told by Aunt Katie and others fill his imagination with the supernatural. As he grows older, he encounters the pleasures and embarrassments of adolescence — his first novel, his first crush, and a moralistic sex education delivered by a priest. The family's secrets ripple outward through the stories people tell: the feud with Donegal, the Field of the Disappeared, and the legend of Grianan. Each secondary event adds texture to the narrator's world and reveals how deeply history and silence are woven into daily life in his community. Together, these moments show the full breadth of his experience beyond the central mystery.

The people, stories, and everyday losses that shaped the narrator's world.

The narrator's uncles tell a story about Father Browne, a priest who traps an evil spirit inside a window pane during an exorcism.

The narrator witnesses a young boy killed by a lorry in the street and is haunted by the image for months afterward.

The narrator's uncles speculate that Tony McIlhenny, who fled to Chicago, may have encountered Uncle Eddie there, though nothing is confirmed.

The narrator's friends lock him alone inside a dark secret passageway at Grianan fort, where he listens in silence for ancient warriors.

Crazy Joe leads the narrator into the library's adults-only art room and shows him a painting of a nude woman.

Crazy Joe tells the narrator about Larry McLaughlin, who lay with a woman in a field and she transformed into a fox.

The narrator attempts to run away from home after being shunned as a community informant, but his family brings him back each time.

After the rosebush incident, the narrator's father orders him to ask no more questions, say nothing, and stay out of his way.

The narrator visits the bishop, who arranges for Father O'Neill to accompany him to the barracks for a formal apology to Sergeant Burke.

The narrator's father takes the boys rowing and admits Eddie was accused as an informant and did not disappear at the distillery.

Liam reveals that the ghost story about the sailor's cursed household is actually the real history of a local family, the Greneghan clan.

The narrator pieces together the full account of Eddie's murder and realizes his maternal grandfather ordered his paternal uncle's death.

An Anglican priest in a British army uniform addresses the narrator's school, arguing that communism matters more than Ireland's internal conflict.

Crazy Joe visits the narrator's mother after leaving an asylum and hints that he never revealed her secret during his time inside.

Political violence erupts across Northern Ireland, and the narrator's aging parents spend their final years watching the conflict unfold outside their window.

Beneath the surface of the narrator's childhood lie a series of pivotal moments where one thing is revealed to be another entirely. Ghost stories turn out to be disguised family histories, and chance encounters — with Crazy Joe, with Sergeant Burke, with his own father on a rowboat — unlock pieces of a truth the narrator has been chasing for years. The supernatural tales woven throughout the novel gain new meaning as connections emerge between folklore and real events, linking the exorcism story to a living family's curse and Larry McLaughlin's legend to the night of Eddie's death. Pivotal choices, like the narrator's attempts to run away or his decision to confront his mother's secret with a bouquet of flowers, mark his growing need to possess his own narrative. By the time political violence erupts around him, the narrator has assembled the full truth, but his family has already been silenced. These turning points reveal how knowledge, without the freedom to speak it, can deepen isolation rather than relieve it.