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 the Chesapeake Bay in The Right-Hand Shore. It is 1920, 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 the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she 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 bind 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. The result is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history. The Right-Hand Shore is a New York Times Notable Book of 2012.

The Mason family returns to America from England where they try to recoup their economic losses by moving to Edward Mason's ancestral home in Maryland where he plans to take up farming.

A young interracial couple escapes from Maryland to France in 1892, living first among artists in the vibrant Latin Quarter of Paris, and then beginning a new life as winemakers in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc Twenty-three years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason’s Retreat and six years after The Right-Hand Shore, Christopher Tilghman returns to the saga of the Mason and Bayly families in Thomas and Beal in the Midi. Thomas Bayly and his wife, Beal, have run away to France, escaping the laws and prejudices of post-Reconstruction America. The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds in two settings: first in Paris, and then in the Languedoc, where Thomas and Beal begin a new life as winemakers. Beal, indelible, beautiful, and poised, enchants everyone she meets in this strange new land, including a gaggle of artists in the Latin Quarter when they first arrive in Paris. Later, when they’ve moved to the beautiful and rugged Languedoc, she is torn between the freedoms she experienced in Paris and the return to the farm life she thought she had left behind in America. A moving and delicate portrait of a highly unusual marriage, Thomas and Beal in the Midi is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history—the legacy of slavery and the Civil War—that explores the many ways that the past has an enduring hold over the present.

The short stories of Christopher Tilghman are set against the enroached-upon yet still-expansive landscapes of our continent. From a Montanan widow who marries her ranch hand to the aging patriarch of an old Maryland family on the Eastern Shore, Tilghman's characters bring to life the trials and bonds of belonging to one another—as lovers, as friends, as fathers. This collection of stories, the author's first book, is a deeply American work—composed with a keen sense of our past and our predicaments—but also a celebration of our resiliency. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, John Casey called In a Father's Place "a wonderful surprise . . . a beautiful book, making emotions as vivid and rich in perspective as a loved landscape."

The #1 New York Times bestselling author and “inspirational fiction superstar” (Publishers Weekly) presents this high stakes love story of danger, passion, and faith. She was a child caught in a riptide in the Caribbean Sea. He was a teenager from the East Coast on vacation with his family. He dove in to save her, and that single terrifying moment changed both of their lives forever. Ten years later Jack Ryder is a daring undercover agent with the FBI and Eliza Lawrence still lives on that pristine island. She’s an untainted princess in a kingdom of darkness and evil, on the brink of a forced marriage with a dangerous neighboring drug lord, a marriage arranged by her father. This time when Jack and Eliza meet, there’s a connection neither of them can explain. Both of their lives are on the line, and once again, the stakes are deadly high. Can they join forces in a complicated and dangerous mission, pretending to have a breathtaking love…without really falling? Sometimes miracles happen not once, but twice…along a distant shore.

Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.

A novel about journalism and one man’s moral choices, “evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway’s early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement” (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president’s daughter and the father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs—Ned offers no resistance to his publisher’s argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career—until eventually, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations.

A GQ Best Book of the Month • A New York Post Must-Read Book • A Flavorwire Book of the Week • A New York Daily News Can't-Put-Down Novel “[Parish] has got chops, and a feel for dialogue, and is a talent in the making.” —Bill Buford, The Wall Street Journal “Read this book in a beach chair. . . . [A] worldy and propulsive debut.”—GQ An exhilarating novel of reinvention, friendship, and ambition—from the Jersey Shore to St. Andrews in Scotland Tom Alison has it all within his reach. He’s smart, handsome, and about to graduate from a prestigious East Coast boarding school. After that it’s off to the Ivy League and then a job on Wall Street, alongside the power brokers he’s been watching from a distance as the working-class son of a single mom. And then the very life his mother worked so hard to escape catches up with him when he gets busted selling drugs. Lucky for Tom, there are places for boys and girls with ruined reputations. First, he returns to his roots on the Jersey Shore, reconnecting with a hard-living crew and cementing a bond with his new friend Clare Savage—the son of a recently disgraced financier. The two boys spend their summer surfing and partying. When fall arrives, they head to St. Andrews University in Scotland, a haven for Americans in need of a second chance and a favorite of the British rul­ing class. Tom and Clare escape to Scotland together, but it’s Tom who discovers a world shaped by even more powerful forces of greed and am­bition than the one he left behind. Sucked into a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and status, Tom learns what it takes to break the rules—and how we can be broken by them. Driven by a cast of young men and women living in an age of riotous prosperity, Down the Shore is an unflinching and unforgettable story of youth steeped in excess. Stan Parish has crafted a gripping novel that masterfully captures the lives of fallen financiers and the people they bring down with them—and reminds us that not even an ocean can separate us from our fam­ily, our friends, or our past.

Her mother's third marriage is only hours old when all hope for Clare's fifteenth summer fades. Before she knows it, Clare is whisked away to some ancient cottage on a tiny marsh island on Cape Cod to spend the summer with her father?a man she hasn't seen since she was three. Clare's biological father barely talks, and when he does, he obsesses about endangered turtles. The first teenager Clare meets on the Cape confirms that her father is known as the town crazy person. But there's something undeniably magical about the marsh and the island?a connection to Clare?s past that runs deeper than memory. Even her father's beloved turtles hold unexpected surprises. As Clare's father begins to reveal more about himself and his own struggle, Clare's summer becomes less of an exile and more of a return.

This superb new collection of stories confirms Tilghman's genius in that edgy territory of family, marriage breakdown, widowhood, parents, children, inheritance and escape, all against a backdrop of richly evoked landscapes from Virginia to Montana. Like Richard Ford, Tilghman unpeals the corner of the male psyche to expose, with empathy and yet a touch of ironic distance, the vulnerabilities which make men run, or lie - or even come back for good.Here are ordinary people - men, for the most part - running from their loves, looking for new hope in a 'bushel of crabs', a cattle ranch, a one-night stand or a whisky glass. But here, too, in these sharply focused and beautifully judged stories are moments of redemption, moments when they stop running and find love, or just a glimmer of self-knowledge.