On the Tobacco Coast: A Novel

by Christopher Tilghman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250371843
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Series:	The Novels of Mason's Retreat , #4
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

02/05/2024

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. The story centers on an Independence Day celebration at Mason’s Retreat, a house on a former tobacco plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that patriarch Harry Mason purchased decades earlier after his father had sold it off. His wife, Kate, whom he met while she was a burgeoning lefty at UC Berkeley and he was an MBA student at Stanford, feels uneasy about the Masons’ legacy of slaveholding and displacement of Native Americans and sees no cause to celebrate, though she’s happy to be reunited with her adult children Eleanor, Ethan, and Rosalie as she recovers from chemotherapy. Novelist Eleanor is also focused on the past, though she worries readers will be turned off by the slave-owning protagonist of her new book. Rosalie, the oldest of Kate and Harry’s children, harbors resentments toward her husband for letting her shoulder the brunt of their childcare duties, while Ethan, the youngest, contends with his girlfriend’s indifference toward him and the family. Tilghman demonstrates particularly keen insight in his depiction of Kate, as she faces the challenge of poaching a 13-pound salmon while confronting the “forces in the house that resisted change.” It’s a satisfying end to a rich saga. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher

2024-02-03
To the victor go the spoils (and the resulting spoilage).

It is July 4, 2019. As the descendants of the Mason family gather for their traditional meal of salmon and peas at the plantation home of their forebears (among the earliest settlers of the Chesapeake Bay environs), the time has come for a reckoning. The legacy of all that was wrought over the course of several generations—displacement of the Indigenous population and the use of enslaved people as laborers among the most troubling practices—weighs upon members of the group to various degrees. Relatives of the current owners are occupied as geologists, aspiring novelists, and real estate executives; all three professions provide support for holiday discussions of time, attachment to place, and responsibility for past actions. The guest list waxes and wanes but includes two French relatives who have been touring the U.S. and bring their perspectives on current U.S. culture and race relations to the table in a no-holds-barred way. The 2019 dinner will go down in the annals of Mason history as the one when the family confronted the past and grappled with how to proceed in the face of the haunted legacy of the familial estate. An elegiac air pervades this thoughtful narrative as several family members are now of an advanced age or dealing with serious illness. Tilghman has examined various lives within the family in three previous novels, beginning with Mason’s Retreat (1996), so some summarizing takes place, but the real star of the show here is the extended dinner conversation(s) occurring between and among the guests. While slyly giving credit to famous cinematic dinner table sequences, Tilghman sets in motion an engaging scene full of confrontation, humor, annoyance, and revelation (and the origins of the salmon and pea menu).

A cleareyed look at what history has hidden.

Kirkus Reviews