On a New England morning 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—but the farther they go, the stranger their surroundings become.

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.

Disquieting and delightful, Idle Grounds is a rich exploration of the interior lives of children and a gripping meditation on birthright, decline, and 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.

“Arch and haunting...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.” —Publishers Weekly

“To read Krystelle Bamford’s astonishing debut is to be perpetually conflicted, like the child cousins it follows, between tearing at breakneck speed through the forest of its gorgeous pages to find out what will happen next, and deliberating with delirious languor, stopping to pick up, turn over, and marvel at each wryly glorious description, each exquisite joke. Idle Grounds left me like a kid with a dreadful yet delicious secret who tells everyone, I know something you don’t know!—but I can’t tell; you’ll have to find out for yourself.” —Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead

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.