Marilyn Noell looks back over the past forty-three years of her life as a quadriplegic. Her struggles have been many – fear, depression, surgery, learning to use what "moving parts" remained after her diving accident when she was just nineteen. But perhaps her toughest challenge has been to be and be seen as a useful, active individual.

The bestselling biography of renowned Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables available in English for the first time The name Hanako Muraoka is revered in Japan. Her Japanese translation of L. M. Montgomery's beloved children's classic Anne of Green Gables, Akage no An (Red-haired Anne), was the catalyst for the book's massive and enduring popularity in Japan. A book that has since spawned countless interpretations, from manga to a long-running television series, and has remained on Japanese curriculum for half a century. For the first time, the bestselling biography of Hanako Muraoka written by her granddaughter, Eri Muraoka, and translated by the award-winning Cathy Hirano (The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up), is available in English. A young girl born into an impoverished farming family in Yamanashi Prefecture, when Hanako Muraoka is given the opportunity to attend the illustrious girls' school Tōyō Eiwa Jogakuin, she falls in love with the English language, and with translating poetry. This love of the written word leads to a career as a children's writer, but her burgeoning literary life is cut tragically short with the death of her son and the bankruptcy of her husband's printing company. When the Second World War brings an end to her stint reading children's stories over the radio--for which she is known across Japan as 'Aunty Radio'--she turns to her first love: translation. It was the story of a young girl in a pastoral setting with a love of poetry that spoke most powerfully to Muraoka's heart. Amidst the wail of air raid sirens, she began translating her copy of Anne of Green Gables into Japanese around 1943, completing the majority of the work during the Second World War. In 1952, despite the crumbling of the Japanese publishing industry and the censorship enforced by the occupation, a publisher took a chance on an unknown translator, and the rest is history. From rural Japan to mid-century Tokyo, Anne's Cradle tells the complex and captivating story of a woman who came of age in conservative twentieth-century Japan, and risked everything to bring the best of children's literature to her people, and cultivated a literary career that led generations of Japanese readers to fall in love with a plucky redhead from Prince Edward Island.

Anna Smith Strong (1790-1812) was a fearless woman who acted as a spy for George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Recruited by Washington's spymaster Major Benjamin Tallmadge, she joined the Culper Ring, a group of American spies. General Washington placed a huge amount of trust in his spies, and Anna helped pass him important messages at great risk to herself and her family. One of her cleverer devices was to hang laundry on the line in a planned fashion so that other spies could read the "message." Had she been discovered by the British, she would have faced jail or execution. Thrilling and dramatic, Anna Strong tells the story of how one brave woman helped change the course of American history.

Since his arrival at The Daily Show in 1999, Jon Stewart has become one of the major players in comedy as well as one of the most significant liberal voices in the media and on television today. In Angry Optimist, Lisa Rogak charts his unlikely rise to political stardom, from his early stand-up days to the short-lived but acclaimed Jon Stewart Show. Drawing on interviews with current and former colleagues, she reveals how things work behind the scenes at The Daily Show.With speculation simmering about Stewart's possible retirement from The Daily Show and a contentious midterm election in 2014, this biography may come to serve as a capstone for a comedian who has wielded incredible power in American politics.

Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black liberation, feminist, queer, and prison-abolitionist movements for more than fifty years. This autobiography, first published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in these struggles.

In the autumn of 1915 Will Bird was working on a farm in Saskatchewan when the ghost of his brother Stephen, killed by German mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice. When it first appeared in 1930, Bird's memoir was hailed by many veterans as the most authentic account of the war experience, uncompromising in its portrayal of the horror and savagery, while also honouring the bravery, camaraderie, and unexpected spirituality that flourished among the enlisted men. Written in part as a reaction to anti-war novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, which Bird criticized for portraying the soldier as "a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor," And We Go On is a nuanced response to the trauma of war, suffused with an interest in the spiritual and the paranormal not found in other war literature. Long out of print, it is a true lost classic that arguably influenced numerous works in the Canadian literary canon, including novels by Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley. In an introduction and afterword, David Williams illuminates Bird's work by placing it within the genre of Great War literature and by discussing the book's publication history and reception.

Jane Christmas takes a decidedly unconventional journey to find out whether she is, as she puts it, "nun material". This is no carefree adventure. The call toward a religious vocation has beckoned Jane since she was a teenager, and now in her fifties she decides to explore it in earnest. Meanwhile, her long-term partner Colin, previously disinterested in marriage, springs a surprise marriage proposal on her unaware of what she is about to tell him. Jane, however, decides not to allow her monastic dreams to be interrupted. She sets off on an extraordinary and intense year-plus journey that takes her to four religious communities-one in Canada and three in the UK-and in the course of her immersion provides a seldom-seen glimpse inside modern cloistered life. The book lacks none of the bursts of candor or unrestrained humor that have made her books so popular and relatable (this one is sure to ruffle a few starched clerical collars), but And Then There Were Nuns comes with a darker side as the author comes to terms with a traumatic event from her past.

In 1988, Kimball's mother attempted suicide on Mother's Day, and this became one of many things Kimball's family never speaks about. As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a visual journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades. It is an inspiring portrayal of what drives a family apart and what keeps it together.

Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age during the Great Depression in Texas, was supposedly married thirteen times, and survived being shot in the stomach by one of his wives. His father purportedly killed a man in the street with a hay hook, and later died in a mental institution. On her father's side, a Massachusetts ancestor was accused of being a witch, who cast sickness on her neighbor's ox and was later tried in court for causing the death of a child. Maud's father had a master's in aerospace engineering on scholarship from an Ivy League university and was valedictorian of his law school class; he also viewed slavery as a benevolent institution that should never have been disbanded, and would paint over the faces of brown children in her storybooks. He was obsessed with maintaining the purity of his family bloodline, which he could trace back to the days of the Revolutionary War. Her mother was a whirlwind of charisma and passions that could become obsessions; she kept over thirty cats and birds in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, and later started a church in her living room, where she would perform exorcisms. Maud's parents' marriage was acrimonious, their divorce a relief. But the meeting of their lines in her was something she could not shake. She signed up for an online account and began researching her genealogy. She found records of marriages and trials, wills in which her ancestors gave slaves to their spouses and children. The search took over her life. But as she dabbled in DNA testing and found herself sunk in census archives at 1 o'clock in the morning, it was unclear to her what she was looking for. She wanted a truth that would set her free, in a way she hadn't identified yet. This book seeks to understand why the practice of genealogy has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in contemporary America, while also mining the secrets and contradictions of one singularly memorable family history.