Can you honestly say, if you are a mother, that you’ve never even thought about it? That you’ve never so much as let yourself imagine for a second how it would feel to just walk out of the door and leave all the chaos behind, on one of those long, scratchy afternoons when it seems as if bedtime will never come? If you haven’t, then perhaps this book isn’t for you. But I suspect there are many, many other mothers – the ones who have indeed let that guilty fantasy cross their minds, while knowing full well they’re never going to actually do it – who are going to inhale The Abandoners. I know I did.

Written partly during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers trapped at home close to breaking point, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s tale “of mothers and monsters” is, on the face of it, about women who break the ultimate taboo and desert their children. Some are jaw-dropping stories in themselves: take the novelist Muriel Spark, who left her four-year-old in the care of nuns in Rhodesia during the second world war, after separating from his father, and moved back to Britain; or the YouTube influencer who very publicly adopted a Chinese child and then furtively “rehomed” him when it didn’t work out as planned. But it is the author’s interweaving of these stories with more everyday reflections on maternal guilt and judgment that turns this book into a fascinating portrait not just of those who leave, but those who stay.

Why, the writer asks herself, is she so drawn to accounts of deserters and so judgmental about them? As a feminist, shouldn’t she be more understanding of a woman choosing to prioritise her work, or her own happiness? After all, famous fathers throughout history have done the same, without being quite so publicly reviled for it. Yet that itch to judge remains, for reasons that arguably become clear once she starts unravelling the fates not just of mothers who walked away, but of the children left behind.

So beautifully translated from Spanish by Lizzie Davis that you forget it’s a translation, this is rich, vivid writing about the eternal push and pull of motherhood. Trying to carve out space to work in lockdown, as a freelance journalist with two small children demanding her attention, is like “living in a state of attack”, where at any moment “whatever is happening in your head will be swarmed and plundered”. In more normal times, Gómez Urzaiz’s visceral longing to be with them after a day apart is so great that she has “got off city buses that seem too slow, considered other options (taxi? Running down the street like someone who has lost her mind?) that might allow me to scrape together three or seven extra minutes with my children”. She sobs in hotel rooms when separated from them on work trips, yet simultaneously confesses to a surge of pleasure “at the prospect of being alone in a hotel room, in a dressing gown, without having to make dinner for the kids”.

Few things I have read lately convey so exactly the sense of loving your children so much you can barely breathe, yet sometimes craving escape; of thinking you’ll explode if you have to cook one more load of pasta or read the book about tractors one more damn time, while knowing that you will in fact do these things over and over again because that’s what mothering is, a lot of the time. The question haunting this book is: why don’t women who do leave feel this compulsion? Did the writers and actors and musicians among them – for many of Gómez Urzaiz’s examples were artists who might never have been so productive otherwise – find motherhood ultimately incompatible with creativity, or did the fact they were already moving in circles less bound by convention make leaving easier? Did some of them simply stumble into motherhood, in an era when that was women’s expected destiny, only realising too late they’d have been better off childless?

Since most of her examples are historical figures or distant celebrities no longer available to answer such questions, much of the mystery remains unsolved (though the heartbreaking interviews she conducts with present-day immigrant mothers, attempting to lift far-flung families out of poverty by leaving their children behind to work in Spain, add a thought-provoking modern coda). But there’s something illuminating nonetheless about seeing these supposedly monstrous stories set in the familiar context of modern motherhood, with its more muted everyday struggle between work and the pram in the hall, or between your own needs and someone else’s. The monsters that live longest in the imagination are the ones in whom we catch, however exaggerated and distorted, a glimpse of ourselves.

• The Abandoners by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz is published by The Borough Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply