Idle Grounds

November 18, 2024
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. Agent: Daisy Chandley, Peters Fraser and Dunlop.

January 1, 2025
At first glance, Bamford's debut is a seemingly innocuous story about a group of cousins going somewhere that they shouldn't when the adults around them aren't paying attention. There is more to Idle Grounds than that, however. Driven by the sudden disappearance of the littlest child, the group decides to explore their late grandmother's property. As they search for the child and slowly descend into a thick forest that seems both terrifying and magical, Bamford begins to expand a simple story into a literary journey rich with magical realism, beautiful and eerie all at once. The author allows the reader to delve deep into the minds of the children as they learn what it means to be who they are and carry burdens on their shoulders forced on them by those who came before. This book is written from multiple perspectives and driven by a narrator with a wandering mind whose fate is in question throughout, adding to the disconnect between the children and adult family members. Idle Grounds is a gorgeous first offering by an author with prodigious skill.

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February 15, 2025
First one, then a second child disappears during a strange, threatening family weekend in a New England landscape haunted by unquiet memories. Glimmering with foreboding, Bamford's debut is an eerie consideration of family secrets in a sun-dappled setting. The action is confined to a late-1980s summer day in the life of a group of relatives, accompanied by their partners and children, but the novel also reaches to the backstory as everyone gathers in Frankie's house to celebrate a birthday. It's a familiar setting to the family. Nearby is the home where Frankie and her four siblings grew up, and also the burned-out remains of their mother Beezy's childhood house. Yet, to the next generation, a group of young cousins, this patch of horse country has suddenly become sinister. A zipping creature, a glutinous visual effect hanging over the forest, and terrified animals all spook them. When 3-year-old Abi goes missing, her brother, 12-year-old Travis, heads after her and vanishes, too. This leaves the other children searching the surroundings, hearing voices and seeing visions, reacting with childlike volatility. The parents, meanwhile, ignore them and bicker. The narrative is delivered in the confiding first-person voice of one of the cousins--"what you should probably know is that the day was bright and clean"--who's looking back from adulthood, mixing the events of the day with speculation, suggestion, and glimpses of past familial discord, including some violence. The narrative is sometimes interrupted by "Intermezzos" telling various family stories, all threaded with a strange humor. The novel casts an atmospheric spell with its surreal episodes and hints of unhappiness, observed from the children's perspective. Malignity hovers, events and artifacts are left dangling--a missing watch, a painted statuette, a pristine tennis court--and tragedy does eventually arrive. But the story concludes elsewhere, with the now-grown narrator still teasing its dark implications. One family's murky hinterland is evoked in modern gothic form. Curious and original.

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