Hadley Leggett

Author of
All They Ask is Everything (Lake Union, 2024)

Hadley Leggett lives and writes in Seattle, WA. Before turning to fiction, her winding career path included degrees in medicine, biochemistry, Spanish, and science journalism. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Literary Mama, and Halfway Down the Stairs, and her science writing can be found at Wired.com and Stanford News. She’s the mother of three children, three cats, and an ever-rotating troop of foster kittens.

Twitter / Instagram / Hadley.ink / Represented by Serene Hakim

All They Ask is Everything (Lake Union, 2024)

ALL THEY ASK IS EVERYTHING tells the story of three women all trying to be the perfect mom — for the same two little girls. 

Two years after her husband’s fatal car accident, Hannah still blames herself. To assuage her guilt, she pours herself into motherhood, determined to be loving, involved, and present — basically everything her own mother wasn’t. But as she sacrifices layer after layer of her identity and becomes increasingly isolated, Hannah’s mental health spirals out of control. Too broke to go to the doctor and too ashamed to ask for help, she makes a devastating mistake that lands her daughters, ages seven and three, in foster care. 

Hannah will do anything to reunite her family, but when first-time foster mom Julie discovers suspicious bruises on the seven-year-old, she becomes convinced the girls have been abused. Single, lonely, and desperate for children of her own, Julie bonds with the girls and embarks on a quest to adopt them — only to collide with Hannah’s estranged mother Elaine, who swoops in with her own plan. Widowed and recently forced to retire from the law firm that was her life, Elaine decides rescuing her granddaughters will be her final, most important case — if she can crack the emotional wall she’s built around herself. 

Each woman thinks she knows what’s best for the girls, until the truth shatters everything they thought they knew about motherhood. Told from the divergent perspectives of the three women fighting for custody, ALL THEY ASK IS EVERYTHING ultimately questions our society’s definition of a “good” mother, proving that sometimes the only way to help your children is to help yourself.