Six Miles from England: A Novel Based on the True Story of Shirley May France

In September 1949, a seventeen-year-old from Somerset, Massachusetts, became one of the most photographed girls in the world. Not for winning. For failing.Shirley May France never asked for the English Channel. A promoter sold the attempt to the newspapers before she had swum a mile of it, put a movie title across the front of her swimsuit, and sent her into the water with six boats, two airplanes, and the press of two continents following every stroke. Six miles from England, they pulled her out. She begged them to leave her in.The next summer she swam for thirteen hours and was pulled again, on the same day a thirty-one-year-old from San Diego, whom almost nobody was watching, swam the Channel and broke the record. Weeks later Shirley had the best water of her life and the English shore in plain sight. Then a single hand touched her shoulder, which under Channel rules ended the swim. The hand was her father's.Her town threw her a parade anyway. And then she spent the next sixty years doing the one thing nobody had ever taught her: how to stop. A Marine pilot's widow before she was thirty. A pork-pie shop, and a counter to stand behind. A pool at the Fall River YMCA where she taught children to float before she taught them anything else, and rarely told them how far she had once gone.Written by her grandson from the public record and the family's memory, and careful about which is which, Six Miles from England is a novel about the half of a famous life the cameras never came for, and the case that it was the half that counted.