Kirjahaku

This superb new collection of stories confirms Tilghman's genius in that edgy territory of family, marriage breakdown, widowhood, parents, children, inheritance and escape, all against a backdrop of richly evoked landscapes from Virginia to Montana. Like Richard Ford, Tilghman unpeals the corner of the male psyche to expose, with empathy and yet a touch of ironic distance, the vulnerabilities which make men run, or lie - or even come back for good.Here are ordinary people - men, for the most part - running from their loves, looking for new hope in a 'bushel of crabs', a cattle ranch, a one-night stand or a whisky glass. But here, too, in these sharply focused and beautifully judged stories are moments of redemption, moments when they stop running and find love, or just a glimmer of self-knowledge.

MASON'S RETREAT is a powerful, spellbindingly readable story about a family and a place. But events take a very different turn, as the house, the beautiful watery landscape, and new and insidious pressures of class tension and sexual desire begin to exert a profound effect on the family and their world.

The culmination of Christopher Tilghman's great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family.It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering at their historic Chesapeake farm, Mason's Retreat. It isn't everyone's favorite party, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into hosting a celebratory dinner. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason settler, who landed there in 1659. Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, "What crime against humanity did your family not commit on that land?" And so it is more or less inevitable that when the clan, joined by a cast of neighbors and French cousins, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should think and feel about their past comes to the fore. Told with irony and deep insight, On the Tobacco Coast is Christopher Tilghman's concluding meditation on the themes of his novels about this ancestral monument: pride and shame in its long history, the persistence of family stories, race and privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It reflects on the state of America today, with its battles over its own history and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to an uncertain, more just future.

A New York Times Book Review Notable BookThe year is 1936, and the world is on the brink of war. American expatriot Edward Mason, owner of a failing machine factory, is fighting more private battles. In the face of defeat, he abandons his adopted home in England in order to reclaim his inheritance on Maryland's Eastern Shore---a ruinous, thousand-acre estate known ominously as Mason's Retreat. Edward, his wife, Edith, and their two young sons struggle to adjust to life in this strange and storied place. But with war drawing closer, England's hasty rearmament offers Edward a chance to revive the factory, and he returns alone to lead his company. Meanwhile, his wife and sons are left to make their own fortunes. When an unsigned letter informs Edward of where those fortunes have led, he hastens back, an ill-fated move that will have devastating consequences for everyone involved. Haunted, moving, and masterfully written, "Christopher Tilghman's deeply remembered novel is a loyal testament to history---to the lure and bind of family, to the earth that spat us out and receives us unquestionably again" (Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe).

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A masterful novel that confronts the dilemmas of race, family, and forbidden love in the wake of America's Civil War Fifteen years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason's Retreat, Christopher Tilghman returns to the Mason family and the Chesapeake Bay in The Right-Hand Shore. It is 1920, and Edward Mason is making a call upon Miss Mary Bayly, the current owner of the legendary Mason family estate, the Retreat. Miss Mary is dying. She plans to give the Retreat to the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she can find. Edward believes he can charm the old lady, secure the estate and be back in Baltimore by lunchtime. Instead, over the course of a long day, he hears the stories that will forever bind him and his family to the land. He hears of Miss Mary's grandfather brutally selling all his slaves in 1857 in order to avoid the reprisals he believes will come with Emancipation. He hears of the doomed efforts by Wyatt Bayly, Miss Mary's father, to turn the Retreat into a vast peach orchard, and of Miss Mary and her brother growing up in a fractured and warring household. He learns of Abel Terrell, son of free blacks who becomes head orchardist, and whose family becomes intimately connected to the Baylys and to the Mason legacy. The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds through vivid set pieces: on rural nineteenth-century industry; on a boyhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; on the unbreakable divisions of race and class; and, finally, on two families attempting to save a son and a daughter from the dangers of their own innocent love. The result is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history. The Right-Hand Shore is a New York Times Notable Book of 2012.

A young interracial couple escapes from Maryland to France in 1892, living first among artists in the vibrant Latin Quarter of Paris, and then beginning a new life as winemakers in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc Twenty-three years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason's Retreat and six years after The Right-Hand Shore, Christopher Tilghman returns to the saga of the Mason and Bayly families in Thomas and Beal in the Midi. Thomas Bayly and his wife, Beal, have run away to France, escaping the laws and prejudices of post-Reconstruction America. The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds in two settings: first in Paris, and then in the Languedoc, where Thomas and Beal begin a new life as winemakers. Beal, indelible, beautiful, and poised, enchants everyone she meets in this strange new land, including a gaggle of artists in the Latin Quarter when they first arrive in Paris. Later, when they've moved to the beautiful and rugged Languedoc, she is torn between the freedoms she experienced in Paris and the return to the farm life she thought she had left behind in America. A moving and delicate portrait of a highly unusual marriage, Thomas and Beal in the Midi is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history--the legacy of slavery and the Civil War--that explores the many ways that the past has an enduring hold over the present.

The culmination of Christopher Tilghman's great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family.It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering at their historic Chesapeake farm, Mason's Retreat. It isn't everyone's favorite party, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into hosting a celebratory dinner. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason settler, who landed there in 1659. Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, "What crime against humanity did your family not commit on that land?" And so it is more or less inevitable that when the clan, joined by a cast of neighbors and French cousins, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should think and feel about their past comes to the fore. Told with irony and deep insight, On the Tobacco Coast is Christopher Tilghman's concluding meditation on the themes of his novels about this ancestral monument: pride and shame in its long history, the persistence of family stories, race and privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It reflects on the state of America today, with its battles over its own history and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to an uncertain, more just future.