The unnamed American family in Idle Grounds, Krystelle Bamford’s gorgeous, spirited debut, is unhappy in its own way. A decade before the story opens, its matriarch, Beezy, died in a strange accident which has left her adult children bickering and preoccupied. Then, one afternoon in the summer of 1989, tragedy strikes again. One of Beezy’s children, the eccentric and childless Frankie, is hosting the others for a birthday party at her New England house. Her siblings and their own children – ‘a varied crew with the normal range of grubby characteristics’, ten or so in number – have all gathered. The novel is told from the perspective of one of the young cousins in a style that is impish, chatty, day-dreaming, flippant (paragraphs occasionally run out of steam in an ‘or whatever’). Events are revealed through the half-light of memory – all muffled conversations, sugar rushes and ‘Cheez Balls balanced on a paper plate’. The child’s-eye view brings a lightness to the day’s proceedings; the possibility of danger is weighed up against the more alarming possibility of boredom. The cousins would hate to waste yet another day ‘thinking about the nine times-tables or something along those lines’.

The drama begins when the adults are distracted, drinking on the back porch. The cousins, unattended, slip away upstairs. Travis, twelve, says he wants to show them something. He leads them to a window and presses ‘his finger against the screen so hard it turn[s] violet-white’. There is strange movement just beyond the backyard: ‘zip, zip zip’. The source of this zipping – something so fast ‘you just knew that whatever it was it didn’t want to be seen’ – is never revealed. The gullible narrator’s awestruck version of events is the only one we have access to; it’s absorbing and convincing enough to feel like it’s the only one that matters. All of a sudden, three-year-old Abi – the smallest and nicest of the cousins, ‘the type who kissed your elbow when you weren’t looking’ – runs towards the zipping and vanishes.

The mission to find her provides the main plot. At points, the quest is driven by loony aimlessness – they wander into a barn, through a paddock, even into a chicken coop. You wonder whether anything will come of it. In the end, something does, and a sense of gravity