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.
