On the Tobacco Coast

“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

“A cleareyed look at what history has hidden.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Tilghman’s four-volume chronicle of the Mason family, having spanned centuries and continents, ends, as it must, around a dinner table–a domestic idyll at which the ghosts of a brutal history, both national and familial, keep trying to pull up a chair. A moving capstone to one of the epic projects in recent American literature.” –Jonathan Dee, author of Sugar Street

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 is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and lives with his wife, the novelist Caroline Preston, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Centreville, Maryland.

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