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A Novel
by Krystelle Bamford
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.
"Unsettling, puckish, and brilliantly written, this novel is an absolute one-off. I loved it." —Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange
"Deviously subtle and intoxicatingly sinister, Idle Grounds conjures up a new language of nightmare symbolism to fill the reader's heart with dread. A deservedly assured debut!" —Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells
This information about Idle Grounds was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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