Christopher Tilghman Selected Works

It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering for its annual celebration at the family’s historic Chesapeake farm, Mason’s Retreat. Once again, Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into participating. 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. 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 crimes against humanity did your family not commit on this farm?” And so it happens that when the family, joined by a cast of neighbors and cousins from France, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should regard their past comes to the fore.

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 work of deep insight and 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.

In The Way People Run, Christopher Tilghman returns to his beloved home terrain: the matters of the heart, our most difficult truths, and the quiet, rugged regions of Chesapeake Bay and the American West. Compared by critics to Fitzgerald, Styron and Faulkner, Tilghman works his subtle emotional magic on the rough and reflective characters in these long stories. In the title piece, chosen by Robert Stone for the Best American Short Stories, a man goes west in search of a new job, only to find his hold on his family slipping in the process. In "Something Important" a man reunites with his long-lost brother, and discovers a dark truth about his own wife. And in "Things Left Undone," chosen by Tobias Wolff for the Best American Short Stories, a young couple struggles to survive a shattering tragedy.

The short stories of Christopher Tilghman are set against the enroached-upon yet still-expansive landscapes of our continent. From a Montana 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."