Idle Grounds
The chilling and darkly funny novel from the award-winning author
-
-
1.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FIRST FICTION
'Ambitious, wildly original ... it will trick and tease you to the bitter end.'
THE TIMES
'Singular and potent ... Unsettling and sharply funny with carefully built-up layers of dis-ease in a comic deadpan.'
GUARDIAN
'A masterclass in misdirection.'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'Unsettling, puckish, and brilliantly written, this novel is an absolute one-off.'
CLAIRE FULLER, Women's Prize shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground
'Magical, perplexing, and funny in a wholly original way.'
RACHEL YODER, author of Nightbitch
'A remarkable, preternatural study of a family reckoning with its own history.'
THE TELEGRAPH
'An acid trip of a novel. Weird, sinister and darkly funny.'
AMY TWIGG, author of Spoilt Creatures
'An unforgettable narrative voice.'
FRANCINE TOON, bestselling author of Pine
As always with these things, it started with a birthday party.
On a bright summer day in 1989 New England, Abi, three years old, vanishes from her aunt’s secluded home. Upstairs, her young cousins are looking out of the window. Something is unfolding in the distance at the edge of the forest – something sinister that is watching them back.
The adults don’t seem to notice that the youngest of the group has disappeared. Too busy bickering over politics and reminiscing about the family’s domineering late matriarch, Beezy, they leave the children with no choice but to get Abi back themselves. As the cousins embark on a quest through their grandmother’s sprawling estate, buried family secrets come to light and long-awaited plans are set in motion. Will they lose themselves while trying to find her?
Idle Grounds is a chilling, evocative and darkly comic debut about childhood, legacy, and the burdens and privileges we carry with us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bamford's arch and haunting debut takes place during a family gathering in June 1989. It's told in the collective voice of 10 cousins ("give or take"), the oldest of whom is 12 and the youngest, Abi, is three, and it follows them over the course of an afternoon birthday party for one of their parents, during which their perspectives change in "ways both surprising and permanent." Amid the children's boredom, a strange form "zipping" repeatedly across the yard catches their attention, and they take turns watching it from their aunt's upstairs bathroom window. Then Abi disappears, and they begin to look for her without telling their parents, first in the basement and barn and then in the nearby house where their parents grew up and the plot where their grandmother's old house used to be. As they drift and tumble through the afternoon, growing hungry and tired and losing track of yet another cousin along the way, they begin to make sense of the mysterious death of their grandmother some years ago, and of the momentous Christmas more recently, during which one aunt slapped another. In barbed, poetic prose, Bamford captures the cousins' uneasy communal existence. It's a fresh spin on the well-worn trope of a family with secrets.
