*Now a Major Film*On the night of 24 August 1875 Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old British Navy captain, launched himself into the English Channel at Dover. Twenty-one hours and 45 minutes later he became the first man to swim the English Channel. In this acclaimed biography, Kathy Watson shows how Captain Webb was instrumental in bringing the sport of swimming into the modern era. It is also a study of the Victorian drive to push back the boundaries of endurance. In THE CROSSING, Watson uses this great British eccentric''s extraordinary life as a springboard to explore themes of obsession and failure and the emerging force of the media, and swimming''s place in our psyche.

In the shadow of the Great Depression and Jim Crow south of the 1930s, an impoverished white family escapes--with the help of Black sharecroppers--from a vengeful Mississippi plantation overseer intent on lynching them. Arriving in California to start a new life, Barney and Lula Stovall are haunted by the past, the children they've left behind, and the daughter they cannot love or protect.

Orphans of the Living follows the peripatetic life of the Stovall family, woven from four parallel stories: Barney and Lula Stovall, and two of their nine children, Glen and Nora Mae.

Their California sojourn--from their hardscrabble dairy farm, to the brig at the San Francisco Presidio, to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge--lead them on paths toward each other and forgiveness. But redemption doesn't come to them all.

*Now a Major Film*On the night of 24 August 1875 Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old British Navy captain, launched himself into the English Channel at Dover. Twenty-one hours and 45 minutes later he became the first man to swim the English Channel. In this acclaimed biography, Kathy Watson shows how Captain Webb was instrumental in bringing the sport of swimming into the modern era. It is also a study of the Victorian drive to push back the boundaries of endurance. In THE CROSSING, Watson uses this great British eccentric''s extraordinary life as a springboard to explore themes of obsession and failure and the emerging force of the media, and swimming''s place in our psyche.

In the shadow of the Great Depression and Jim Crow south of the 1930s, an impoverished white family escapes--with the help of Black sharecroppers--from a vengeful Mississippi plantation overseer intent on lynching them. Arriving in California to start a new life, Barney and Lula Stovall are haunted by the past, the children they've left behind, and the daughter they cannot love or protect.

Orphans of the Living follows the peripatetic life of the Stovall family, woven from four parallel stories: Barney and Lula Stovall, and two of their nine children, Glen and Nora Mae.

Their California sojourn--from their hardscrabble dairy farm, to the brig at the San Francisco Presidio, to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge--lead them on paths toward each other and forgiveness. But redemption doesn't come to them all.