Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2012
368 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
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 their Chesapeake Bay estate in The Right-Hand Shore.
It is 1922, 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 Edward, the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant that Miss Mary 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 tie 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.
"Starred Review. 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
"A haunting tale, richly detailed and thoughtfully planned and written; not a light read, but an enjoyable one." - Library Journal
"Tilghman's trademark nuanced observation and insight are abundantly apparent, but there's no real center to this insistently portentous parable of multiple blight." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Right-Hand Shore was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father's Place, and The Way People Run, and two novels, Mason's Retreat and Roads of the Heart. Currently the director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Virginia, he lives with his wife, the writer Caroline Preston, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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