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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2012
On Sale: April 24, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 0374203482
EAN: 9780374203481
Kindle: B0071W4WGI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
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.
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