Idle Grounds

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. (Feb.)