The short stories of Christopher Tilghman are set against the enroached-upon yet still-expansive landscapes of our continent. From a Montanan widow who marries her ranch hand to the aging patriarch of an old Maryland family on the Eastern Shore, Tilghman's characters bring to life the trials and bonds of belonging to one anotherâ€”as lovers, as friends, as fathers. This collection of stories, the author's first book, is a deeply American workâ€”composed with a keen sense of our past and our predicamentsâ€”but also a celebration of our resiliency. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, John Casey called In a Father's Place "a wonderful surprise . . . a beautiful book, making emotions as vivid and rich in perspective as a loved landscape."

In a Father's Place: Stories

TILGHMAN, Christopher

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins

The Way People Run

Contemporary

Vintage

The short stories of Christopher Tilghman are set against the enroached-upon yet still-expansive landscapes of our continent. From a Montanan widow who marries her ranch hand to the aging patriarch of an old Maryland family on the Eastern Shore, Tilghman's characters bring to life the trials and bonds of belonging to one another—as lovers, as friends, as fathers. This collection of stories, the author's first book, is a deeply American work—composed with a keen sense of our past and our predicaments—but also a celebration of our resiliency. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, John Casey called In a Father's Place "a wonderful surprise . . . a beautiful book, making emotions as vivid and rich in perspective as a loved landscape."

In a Father's Place

Short Stories & Anthologies

Picador

Mason's Retreat

A wealthy family takes up residence at their crumbling estate on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where their love for one another begins to drift toward destruction when they stop communicating. Reprint.

Pica Books

A collection of tales centered around the Chesapeake Bay area offers insights and fresh truths about our shared humanity, following a man who loses his family when seeking a job, a couple who cope with a terrible tragedy, and more. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Way People Run: Stories

Picador USA

The stories in Christpher Tilghman's collection bring to life the trials and bonds of American families, set against the encroached upon yet still expansive landscapes of the continent. These are stories of amazing maturity and scope by a writer of unforgettable impact.

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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.

The Right-Hand Shore: A Novel

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 cousins from France, 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: the pride and shame in its long history, the persistence of family stories, race and privilege, the enigmas and customs of regions. It is a reflects on the state of America today, with its battles with its own history and efforts to reckon with the wrongs of the past while looking forward to an uncertain, more just future.

On the Tobacco Coast: A Novel (The Novels of Mason’s Retreat, 4)

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.

Thomas and Beal in the Midi: A Novel (The Novels of Mason’s Retreat, 3)

Random House Value Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TILGHMAN, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by TILGHMAN, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TILGHMAN, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In a Father's Place: Stories

The Way People Run

In a Father's Place

Mason's Retreat

The Way People Run: Stories

In a Father's Place

The Right-Hand Shore: A Novel

On the Tobacco Coast: A Novel (The Novels of Mason’s Retreat, 4)

Thomas and Beal in the Midi: A Novel (The Novels of Mason’s Retreat, 3)

Mason's Retreat