Abra

Abra Phillips has achieved the right and comfortable life – the one that by all accounts, she belongs in – with a successful and kind husband, two beloved children, a home that reflects prosperity and satisfaction. But is it the right life for her? On what looks like a desperate, maybe crazy impulse, she decides that it’s not. Instead she takes off and creates a radically solitary, self-sufficient existence without family, companionship, guilt or regret. For almost a decade she moves to her own rhythms, comfortingly certain that she is where she belongs – until the daughter she left behind, now grown, tracks her down with her own accusations and questions. But what is ‘the right life’, and how obliged is anyone to follow unspoken but powerful rules? Abra is about questions of selfishness, obligations, and the desire and need to learn and pursue a person’s real nature.   Globe and Mail: "An impressive first novel...a compelling story". Calgary Herald: "Abra is the book of the season, a novel to be savoured for its fine writing, its perceptions, its feelings, its moral and emotional dilemmas...a gripping missing persons story". Publishers Weekly: Abra is "a strangely haunting character". London Free Press: "Joan Barfoot has an enormous story-telling capability, and it's impossible to put this, her first novel, down until the very last page." Hamilton Spectator: "Abra is an absorbing story of a woman who found undiscovered strengths, a new identity and her very soul, and it will be appealing reading to anyone who has ever dreamed about taking a trip to freedom". Ottawa Citizen: "appealing in its relevance and timeliness". Books in Canada (Sandra Martin): "Abra is a strange and important book... It is a risky book, exploring new territory, and it works." Toronto Star: "an honestly felt passage through loss and chaos to discovery". Sheila Fischman (Toronto Star): "Abra Phillips is one of the best realized, most appealing (and troubling) women I've met in a novel since Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley." U of T Quarterly: "an exceptionally accomplished first novel: skilfully structured, very well-written, intelligent". Times Literary Supplement: "above all a novel about personal integrity".