Idle Grounds - by Krystelle Bamford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction
Finalist for Scotland's National Book Award for Debut Fiction

"This debut novel is superb. Idle Grounds is a remarkable, preternatural study of a family reckoning with its own history ... Bamford's arresting novel briefly unveils the strangeness [of childhood] once again." --The Telegraph

In this mesmerizing, sharply funny story about a family in decline, set in 1989 New England, a group of young cousins wander deep into the woods their grandparents once owned--finding that the farther they go, the stranger their surroundings become.

As always with these things it started with a birthday party.

Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with bickering about decades-old crises, the children decide to investigate themselves--to the rickety chicken coop, the barn and its two troublesome horses, and into the woods that once comprised their late grandmother's property. The more the children search, and the deeper they walk, the more unsettling the woods become and the more lost they are, caught between their aunt's home in the present day, their parents' childhood home just through the trees, and the memory of the house their grandmother grew up in. Soon, what began as a quest for answers gives way to a journey that undermines everything they've been told about who they are, where they came from, and what they deserve.

Told in the young cousins' collective voice, in a mode that moves between childhood memory, New England Gothic, and a Reagan-era Nancy Drew, Idle Grounds is an "unsettling and sharply funny" (The Guardian) exploration of the interior lives of children and a gripping meditation on birthright, decline, and the weight of family history. A fable of the distortions of privilege and the impossibility of keeping secrets hidden, this is a novel about straying from home--only to come back unraveled, unsettled, and irrevocably changed.

Review Quotes

An NPR Book of the Day One of Town & Country's Best Books of February A Lit Hub, TAG24, Dazed Digital, and Cosmopolitan UK Most Anticipated Book

About the Author

Krystelle Bamford's work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, bath magg, Under the Radar, The Scores, and numerous anthologies including the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021. She is a 2019 Primers poet and was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Raised in the US, she now lives in Edinburgh with her partner and children. Idle Grounds is her first novel.