Anne Leigh Parrish’s debut story collection, All The Roads That Lead From Home (Press 53, 2011) won a silver medal in the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her second collection, Our Love Could Light The World, (She Writes Press, 2013) is a Kirkus Reviews recommended Indie title, and a finalist in both the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Maggie and Marta Dugan, twenty-seven-year-old identical twins, live the good life in New York City on their stepfather’s money. Each has a glamorous calling. Maggie paints; Marta appears onstage. Success, though, eludes them. Marta’s roles are few and far between. Maggie’s endorsements are infrequent at best. When gallery after gallery passes on her work, she begins to doubt her talent. Home alone one afternoon, fueled by frustration, she is seized by a sudden, wild impulse to masquerade as Marta when a friend of hers drops by. The ruse is quickly discovered when Marta returns from another shopping spree, a rift between the sisters ensues, and they go their separate ways. But living apart proves harder than either thought at first. Each carries the other firmly within her, making any true independence nearly impossible. As the weeks pass, the weight of absence sometimes becomes difficult to bear. Both find a surprising degree of success in their respective efforts, due perhaps to their newfound freedom, yet the bond between them remains firm. Can they come back together, and under what circumstances would a reunion be viable? Has the time come for an open discussion of their issues with each other? Unable to fully answer these questions, each knows only that she needs the other to feel whole.

When Lavinia Starkhurst’s husband is killed in a freak accident, she takes to the open road and meets a number of strangers, all with struggles of their own. Through these unexpected and occasionally hilarious encounters, Lavinia reflects on her past deeds, both good and bad, explores her two marriages, her roles as caregiver and wife, hoping all the while for self-acceptance and something to give her new life meaning.

With themes of reproductive rights and  feminism, this multi-generational novel presents three women whose paths cross at the Lindell Retirement Home. Constance Maynard, fierce, independent and proud, reflects on her long life promoting women’s rights through her career as a professor of history. Eunice Fitch, the perfect caregiver, is often unlucky in love, yet even in middle age refuses to give up searching for the perfect man. Sam Clark is a young aide with a passion for poetry and , small beautiful things, but at war with her own large, ungainly physique. All together they weave a tapestry as rich and complex as the female experience itself.

By The Wayside, the third story collection by award-winning author Anne Leigh Parrish, draws together eighteen previously published pieces about women, often in absurd situations, struggling to survive in a world that is often hostile to the female experience.

Meet Anna, Lorraine, Freddie, and Beth. Four women, who share blood and not much more, except that each is searching for something lost. Anna seeks to find her place in a new world. Lorraine looks to an all-powerful god to forget herself in. Freddie searches for herself without religion to forget her mother’s overbearing doctrine. Beth can’t find her soul in her mother’s walled off eyes.

For four generations these women have run away, run away from their own mother, their family, until Freddie sees in her daughter, Beth, the chance to break the cycle. With the support of her sister and the lingering words of a deceased husband, Freddie takes the first steps to healing herself and her relationship with her daughter, by confronting her past and her relationship with God.

With intelligence and understanding, Anne Leigh Parrish questions the cyclical nature of family and motherhood, and the occasionally agonizing, often shaky, but always deep connection between love and true faith.

Thoughtful and heartrending, What is Found, What is Lost captures the color hidden amidst the modern black and white portrayal of religion by examining the characters’ doubts and flaws and the prevailing need to believe in something larger than themselves.