The Steps begins with a child falling. Jules, 18 months old, slips from a staircase, stops breathing and is brought back. “It was a resurrection story,” we are told. From the outset, Juliano Zaffino’s debut establishes a world in which experience is shaped by narration, where memory and belief blur.
Derek’s childhood sweetheart, Sophie, arrives in England from Canada with her children, and together they attempt to fashion a life under one roof. Derek steps into the role of caregiver within a household already structured by loss, volatility and a shifting internal logic. Angelo’s eruptions, Ema’s vigilance, Elio’s near-invisibility and the fragile presence of Jules create a charged atmosphere in which every gesture carries consequence.
A literary stylist, Zaffino transforms the familiar terrain of family life into something formally assured and psychologically sharp. With precise, controlled prose, scenes arrive in compact, half-page blocks, tightly framed and carrying a distinct charge. This gives the novel a propulsive rhythm. There is a sense of staging that recalls the meticulous logic of a Wes Anderson film, yet beneath this composure lies a gathering unease.
The family emerges as a closed system, one that feeds on itself. Tensions do not dissipate but circulate. Violence is absorbed or silenced; silence breeds speculation; speculation hardens into fear. The children, particularly Jules, become both subjects and authors of this environment, shaping its stories. Derek, meanwhile, attempts to impose coherence, but the narratives he constructs prove fragile.
READ MORE
Zaffino threads this with a light but persistent pattern of reference. The Eurydice myth shadows memory as a dangerous backward glance; Lazarus introduces the possibility of return; Jacob’s Ladder suggests ascent as repetition. A recurring motif of photography – aperture, framing, clarity – complicates the act of seeing, positioning memory as selection as much as record.
In one later section, the prose loosens, taking on a poetic shape. As Derek recognises he has been “telling himself a ghost story”, the language thins and fractures, exposing grief as something that resists containment.
The Steps is a debut of rare confidence, moving from domestic realism into formally inventive terrain without losing its emotional core. Zaffino emerges here as a writer of considerable intelligence, capable of reshaping the novel’s possibilities while remaining anchored in the lived experience of memory and survival.
Adam Wyeth is a poet and critic
