Some novels don’t immediately open themselves up to the reader. You need to have patience and allow the book to come to you.

That’s how I experienced Abra. I found the first thirty or so pages hard-going. There’s a choppiness to the prose as our titular protagonist—who hasn’t spoken to anyone in nine years—finds her voice. But as Abra flashes back to her past, recalling the name and life she once lived, I found myself drawn into the narrative. By the end of the novel I was ensconced in this book, in its radicalism, its knottiness, its beauty. The fact you can only read this electronically—print copies can go for as much as $200—is a crime.

“My name is Abra. My name is Abra.” She must say it twice because she’s almost forgotten who she was. Nine years ago, Abra left her husband and two children for a cabin in the wilds of Ontario in Canada—a place with no mirrors or clocks, where time exists entirely in the present. Nine years later, Abra’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Kate, tracks her down, desperate to know why she walked out on them.

If, like Kate, you’re expecting a straightforward answer to that question, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Abra cannot explain why she left; only that she had to get away, that her life as Abra wasn’t what she wanted or who she was. More than three decades later, Rachel Cusk is pilloried for having the audacity of not so much regretting having children but acknowledging that they subsume a mother’s life. Cusk, at least, didn’t walk away from her family. Abra did. And that’s what makes Barfoot’s novel so provocative, an argument against the mainstream portrayal of motherhood: the need to be a mother.

It’s too easy to frame Abra as a novel about depression and mental health. Doing so strongly implies that Abra’s decision to walk out on her family wasn’t rational but a cry for help. The Abra in the cabin, though she’s no longer known by that name or any name, is so utterly at peace with herself. She is happy. I get it, though. Her happiness and her need for solitude have come at the expense of her children, and both have permanently changed (for the worse in the case of her son Eddie) through the experience. And that’s tragic. The scene where her husband comes to the cabin a year after Abra left is so soul-crushing because he’s a kind, loving man—a very progressive take on masculinity for the mid-70s—and yet Abra can’t fulfil his simple need to know what he did wrong, what he did that made her leave.

And that’s why this debut novel—because, yes, this was Barfoot’s first crack at longer-form fiction—is so damn extraordinary. It’s because we come to love Abra while feeling deep sympathy and sadness for those she left behind. It’s a book comfortable with contradiction. And I love that.

P.S. The quote from The Calgary Herald couldn’t be so wrong. And the cover… oh, God, the cover.