Mason's Retreat

Christopher Tilghmann lives with his wife and three children in central Massachusetts. He is the author of the story collection<i> In a Father's Place</i>, which appeared to wide acclaim in 1990. His stories have been anthologised often in<i> The Best American Short Stories</i> and in other anthologies in the United States and abroad. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them the Guggeheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer's Award, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, he has taught at the University of Virginia and ohher graduate writing programmes.

MASON'S RETREAT is a powerful, spellbindingly readable story about a family and a place. In 1936, Edward and Edith Mason return to America after a decade in England, with their two sons Simon and Sebastien. Their destination is an old family estate on the coast of Maryland, known as 'The Retreat'. They plan to revive it, and restore their own diminished fortune. But events take a very different turn, as the house, the beautiful watery landscape, and new and insidious pressures of class tension and sexual desire begin to exert a profound effect on the family and their world. Haunting, compelling, charged with subtle eroticism and a poignant sense of transience, this is a magnificent novel. It propels Tilghman into the ranks of the great American writers.

Christopher Tilghman

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.

Christopher Tilghman

Books by Christopher Tilghman

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