Chris Tilghman
The Bookplate is continuing its 2024 season of author lectures on June 12th with regional author Christopher Tilghman for a 6pm reservation required event at Sultana’s Lawrence Wetlands Preserve.
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 reflection 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.
“Elegant, boisterous, and moving.” —Taylor Antrim, Vogue
“Over the course of four books, beginning with Mason’s Retreat (1996), Tilghman has produced a wonderful saga about a Chesapeake family, incorporating a superb sense of place with expressive prose and complex interpersonal dynamics . . . While this novel can stand alone, it also has great respect for the series’ history, bringing many generational strands to a satisfying close.” —Sarah Johnson, Booklist
“Tilghman concludes his Chesapeake Bay quartet (after Thomas and Beal in the Midi) with this understated yet consequential drama of an American family’s reckoning with its colonial heritage . . . A satisfying end to a rich saga.” —Publishers Weekly
Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, and four previous novels, including Thomas and Beal in the Midi, The Right-Hand Shore, and Mason’s Retreat, which recount the connected stories of the Mason and Bayly families. He lives with his wife, the novelist Caroline Preston, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Centreville, Maryland.
For more event details or to reserve your seat, contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. These events are free and open to the public, but reservations are required for the Tilghman event on June 12th. The Lawrence Wetlands Preserve is located at 301 S. Mill Street in Chestertown, Maryland. The Bookplate will continue their event series with a Pride Month event at the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve on Saturday June 22nd as poet Sunu P. Chandy and author Jeffrey Dale Lofton will be discussing their individual works My Dear Comrades and Red Clay Suzie.
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