A dazzling, revealing exploration of motherhood, independence and taboo

‘The best kind of book: the one you didn’t know you were craving until it appeared … self-interrogative, intricately perceptive. I absolutely inhaled it’ JIA TOLENTINO

‘A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories with such intelligence and wit and generosity’ TESSA HADLEY

‘Fascinating … I suspect there are many, many other mothers who are going to inhale The Abandoners’OBSERVER

When it comes to children: a man leaves, a woman abandons

Journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz is fascinated by women who left their children behind to pursue their artistic lives. Women like Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.

This book captures those extraordinary stories, along with the realities of women who have no choice but to separate from their families, and the everyday guilt of mothers who dream quietly of freedom.

This is a book about motherhood, selfhood, ambition and creativity. Above all, it captures what our judgement of those women who ‘abandon’ tells us about our judgement of all women.

‘The best book I've read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti's Motherhood’ CLAUDIA DURASTANTI