A novel that left its family behind in 1978 is finding its way back to shelves. Faber & Faber has reissued Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground in paperback, priced at £9.99, and the Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright has marked the occasion with a review in The Guardian calling the book "a landmark feminist novel" (The Guardian).

Barfoot is a Canadian author, and Gaining Ground was first published in Canada in 1978 under the title Abra. The Women's Press, a UK publisher devoted to women's writing, brought it to British readers in 1980. Now Faber & Faber — one of Britain's oldest independent literary houses — has issued a fresh paperback edition, carrying the ISBN 9780571399888 and listed for pre-order at £9.99 on the publisher's website (Faber & Faber; Waterstones).

The novel's premise is deceptively simple. A woman named Abra leaves her husband and two children. Nine years later, she is living alone in a cabin in the woods. Then her 18-year-old daughter Katie arrives, seeking the mother who walked out. What follows is a confrontation between two people shaped by the same absence — one who chose to go, one who was left behind (The Guardian).

Enright, who won the Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering, celebrates the novel as a landmark of feminist fiction — a book whose account of a woman choosing solitude over family life carried a particular charge in the late 1970s and has lost none of it since. The review was published on 27 July 2026 (The Guardian).

The reissue carries a blurb from Samantha Harvey, who describes Gaining Ground as "a life-changing book" (Faber & Faber). Harvey won the Booker Prize in 2024 for Orbital, making her endorsement a notable signal from one prizewinner to a readership that follows literary awards.

What makes this reissue quietly significant is the publishing chain it represents. A Canadian novel nearly fifty years old, originally issued under a different title, kept alive first by a feminist press in 1980 and now picked up by one of Britain's flagship literary publishers — that is a long road from manuscript to shelf. The Women's Press, which published the first UK edition, was itself a landmark institution: a house founded in 1978 specifically to publish women's writing, at a time when mainstream lists were largely male. Faber's decision to reissue the book in 2026 places Barfoot's novel in a very different publishing landscape, but one where the question at its centre — what does a woman owe those she leaves behind? — still lands with force.

For readers, the upshot is straightforward. A novel that has been out of mainstream circulation in the UK is available again in a new paperback edition, introduced to a fresh audience by one of Ireland's most decorated living novelists.