In the tradition of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, FOUR MOTHERS follows four women—Anna from Finland, Tsukasa from Japan, Sarah from the U.S., and Chelsea from Kenya—through the first year of motherhood.
FOUR MOTHERS
by Abigail Leonard
Algonquin, Fall 2025)
(via The Friedrich Agency)
Abigail blends reporting, research, and history to create an international portrait of new motherhood and the policies that scaffold this transitional phase of life. As debates surrounding paid leave, universal daycare, and national healthcare rage on across different corners of the globe, FOUR MOTHERS is an intimate narrative of what those policies mean in the everyday lives of four women—and a compelling argument for the necessity and urgency of supporting parents.
Abigail Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and news producer. Her work has appeared in NPR, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. She has written and produced long-form news documentaries for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, an Association of Health Care Journalists Award, a National Headliner Award, and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination.
It is the early 1980s and for twenty years Father Joe Kreitzer has been dutifully serving the Lakota community on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota. And in all this time he has carried memories of Veronica; their parting propelled him into the church. Now she has reached out, wanting to rekindle what they had turned their back on so many years ago. While grappling with this resurgence from his past, Joe’s dear friend Alice Nighthawk comes to him with news of her son Little Bear’s arrest for attempted murder. In his efforts to help exonerate Bear, Joe uncovers long buried evidence of a church cover up of abuse at a Catholic school on the reservation, forcing him to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps. What unfolds is an intimately layered story of love, and a search for answers.
Growing up in India and the United States, and being a brown-skinned, cis-gendered, gay man with an Indian name, Anu has experienced different levels of bias, privilege, and prejudice in his life—ranging from the subtly stinging to the all-out violent—and he knows intimately the importance of breaking not only interpersonal bias, but our own internalized biases. Today, he is the founder of BE MORE with Anu, an organization that funds independent research on breaking bias and has provided anti-bias trainings to hundreds of companies around the world.
THE BOSS OF YOU will be filled with the same humorous stories and techniques that made Thank You For Arguing such a success. And once again, he will fill the book with tips on self-persuasion not only from the ancients, but from contemporary and historical iconic figures. The book will be anchored by him telling the story about how he used these techniques to convince himself to do something he had thought impossible: training his out-of-shape body to achieve an athletic feat difficult for even much younger men.
In many ways, RAPE GIRL: A STUDY IN NINE PARTS is the book that essayist, critic, and poet Jamie Hood has been writing her entire life. In the thirty years since her first sexual assault (age six, by the neighbor), it has taken many forms: a chronological, straight memoir of violence; a book-length poem; a manifesto; a novel. In the wake of each subsequent attack (twice as a teenager, several times in graduate school, most recently at a Brooklyn bar), and resultant attempt to narrativize the violence, what became clear was that no single genre was able to capture the entirety of what she was trying to say.