Eight books about cousins that explore secrets, rivalries, and kinship

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 Bamford’s first novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight books which "explore cousins as ghosts, rivals, allies, schemers, betrayers, and even lovers." One title on the list:

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s writing is beautifully understated, but her overall body of work reminds me of nothing so much as a spirograph: the novels collide, overlap, retrace, each book adding another illuminating layer. In Anything Is Possible, Strout drops us into her protagonist Lucy Barton’s hometown of Amgash, with its ghosts of a deeply impoverished childhood and the family she left behind.

Part of the loneliness of Lucy’s adult life is how few of her circle understand the marking power of poverty, and because Strout’s novels are elongated mysteries, answers are revealed only in glimpses and across books, decades and hundreds of miles. Two clues to what makes Lucy tick are found here, in her cousins Abel and Dottie. Unlike Lucy’s siblings, whose traumas are bound up with their feelings about Lucy and her lucky escape, Dottie and Abel offer a clearer window into growing up very, very poor: the humiliations and deprivations, the hard-won stability always on the verge of evaporation, and the capacity for a tremendous and thorny empathy–a hallmark of Strout’s fiction.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue