Idle Grounds
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A chilling exploration of privilege, memory, and the unsettling weight of inherited history.” —Oprah Daily
In this thrilling New England gothic set in the late 1980s, a group of young cousins wander deep into the woods on their family’s property, drawn in by uncanny visions and the disappearance of one of their own—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 they must set out 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 threatening 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.
“Unsettling and sharply funny” (The Guardian), Idle Grounds is a rich 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.
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.
