He needs to know how something will end.
-- Narrator (Prologue)

Importance: Feeling overwhelmed by his work and home life, Aidan retreats to the Harrow Road Library for some comfort. He hopes that the space will offer him the same escape that it did when he was a child. In this passage, he seeks out a story to read that will draw him out of reality and into a fictional world. However, Aidan does not simply want a distraction. He wants to enter a space that is orderly. He is attached to books, because they grant him realities that have neat beginnings, middles, and ends, all of which his troublesome life lacks. Aidan's relationship with books, conveyed in this passage, establishes the author's thematic interest in exploring the power of literature to comfort the troubled mind. The moment also foreshadows the way the other characters will find comfort and safety in books.

It was...
-- Narrator (chapter 1)