Idle Grounds Paperback Launch Event with Krystelle Bamford - Wednesday 15th April 2026

Join us in the bookshop to hear Krystelle Bamford in conversation with Aimée MacDonald to celebrate the paperback launch of Idle Grounds.

6.30pm on Wednesday 15th April at Golden Hare Books, 68 St Stephen Street, EH3 5AQ.

Buy a copy of Idle Grounds and receive free entry to the event, or choose our Ticket-Only option for £6 (which can be used towards a purchase of the book at the event).

The paperback edition of Idle Grounds is due to be published on 19th March. Any pre-ordered copies will be sent out/made available to collect on or just after this date.

We will send an email to confirm your booking - please be sure to check your junk/spam folder!

About Idle Grounds  On a bright summer day in 1989 New England, Abi, three years old, vanishes from her aunt’s secluded home. Upstairs, her young cousins are looking out of the window. Something is unfolding in the distance at the edge of the forest – something sinister that is watching them back.

The adults don’t seem to notice that the youngest of the group has disappeared. Too busy bickering over politics and reminiscing about the family’s domineering late matriarch, Beezy, they leave the children with no choice but to get Abi back themselves. As the cousins embark on a quest through their grandmother’s sprawling estate, buried family secrets come to light and long-awaited plans are set in motion.

Will they lose themselves while trying to find her? Idle Grounds is a chilling, evocative and darkly comic debut about childhood, legacy, and the burdens and privileges we carry with us..

About Krystelle Bamford Krystelle Bamford’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, bath magg, PANK, Under the Radar and a number of anthologies including the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 (Eyewear). She is a 2019 Primers (Nine Arches Press) poet and was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Born in France and raised in the US, she now lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two kids. Idle Grounds, her first novel, was published by Hutchinson Heinemann (UK) and Scribner (US) in 2025. 

About Aimée MacDonald Aimée MacDonald is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and poetry and a graduate of The Faber Academy. The Last Witch on the Knock is her first novel.

About The Last Witch on the Knock The Knock hill is a carcass unintelligible as any dream. Wouldn't you rather be a witch than a victim? I didn't realise those were my only options.

In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships to spend the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and stern little cousin, Nina. But amidst the sprawling fields and ragged hills thrums a secret that has cursed the land for generations.

300 years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in The Big House by the Knock hill, wishing for a brighter future far away from the lecherous clutches of her master, the Laird. When she is exiled as a witch for refusing to succumb to his advances, Kate �inds the escape she so desperately seeks in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host.

In the thin place between centuries, through a pulsing wound that bleeds out history, the truth of the past is finally ready to be revealed . . .