The Right-Hand Shore

Reviews

“Constructed, Wuthering Heights style, . . . The Right-Hand Shore represents an outing of some of America's most troubled ghosts . . . Tilghman unfolds his harsh lesson with precision, delicacy and startling humor . . . ‘The Right-Hand Shore' is the dark, magisterial creation of a writer with an uncanny feel for the intersections of place and character in American history. His readers will want to hear more stories from the Eastern Shore estate. Let's just hope he doesn't keep us waiting for another 16 years.” —Fernanda Eberstadt, New York Times Book Review

“Tilghman's exquisite third novel returns to the eastern shore of Maryland to prefigure the events of his first, Mason's Retreat. It's 1920, and recently married Edward Mason has arrived at the Retreat--a former planation and peach orchard, and now a dairy--to meet his distant cousin, Mary Bayly, the current owner. Mary's cancer has put the fate of the property in jeopardy--and Edward in line to receive the gift and burden of the land. After an unsettling interview with the formidable Mary, Edward sits with the longtime property manager, Oral French, and his wife, who recount the Retreat's secrets, from miscegenation to slavery to murder. Listening to the pain caused by pride, selfishness, and the desire for love, Edward feels ‘mauled by the pull of the past, still so fresh for these people.' The tale's descent into tragedy is nevertheless beautiful; ‘creamy yellow' sunlight and the perfume of peach blossoms pervade Mason's Retreat alongside its ghosts and horrors. Tilghman maneuvers through the misery of three generations, following each elegant plot turn inevitably back to its source: this living, breathing land on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[Tilghman] writes so beautifully . . . His long paragraphs and the susurrus of Maryland landscape--‘water grasses with tufts of white blossoms, wild privet, and scraggly water elm'--weave an intoxicating spell. The novel's characters are utterly engrossing. All possess that American familial yen for somehow correcting the mistakes of their own upbringing--of doing better. Yet they are caught in a system designed for stasis. This contradiction creates terrible predicaments that seem designed to bear the maximum amount of pressure on the awful compromises Tilghman's characters must make.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe

“The past has a way of making hearts ache in Christopher Tilghman's excellent novel The Right-Hand Shore. Set in Maryland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his story explores the desires that drive people to try to overcome the past . . . Tilghman, who directs the creative writing program at the University of Virginia, is a short story writer as well as a novelist. Many chapters in his new book could nearly stand on their own as captivating glimpses into the relationships--white and black, owner and workman, man and woman, parent and child--that revolve around the Retreat . . . Tilghman's skill at presenting the clashing points of view for his characters is matched by his ability to evoke their place and time, whether it's a Catholic girls school in Paris or a black village on the peninsula called Tuckertown. There's never a false note, either, only poignant and surprising ones that linger long after the last page.” —Douglas K. Daniel, Associated Press

“Tilghman is such a master of mood that . . . I just kept rereading isolated sentences--like lines of poetry--to savor his descriptions . . . He so fully inhabits the marshy souls of his characters, there's never any of those awkward moments where, as a reader, you're jarred out of his story with the awareness that you're reading ‘historical fiction.' With The Right-Hand Shore, Tilghman remains ‘the real deal.'” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“A hugely enjoyable saga, elegantly told.” —David Evans, Financial Times

“A rare achievement. Christopher Tilghman's vision of the American past--and particularly of individuals caught in the tidal sweep of history--is dazzling in its precision and clarity.” —Charles Frazier, winner of the National Book Award for Cold Mountain

“Christopher Tilghman is a novelist's novelist in that he can hold the years in his head and then deal them out in a layered story so achingly gracious and incisive that it becomes for a week in a reader's house the very reason for the chair, the lamp. Offered in Tilghman's astonishing prose, the story of this place--focusing on two families, two races, the history of a peach orchard, and a love that is both natural and forbidden--is a reader's deep pleasure. The story flows inexorably through the insistent harm of the period, which is brought to such life that we see it is really our own. This is a big, wonderful novel.” —Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and Five Skies

“This is bold storytelling--a man spends a day listening to tales of the past that become an eloquent set of voices sailing through his imagination and into an intimate history of a place called Mason's Retreat. It's a wonderful novel, unfolded in elegant and precise language.” —Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh