On the Tobacco Coast

The culmination of Christopher Tilghman’s great Chesapeake saga, a story spanning four centuries of an American family. It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering at their historic Chesapeake farm, Mason’s Retreat. It isn’t everyone’s favorite party, but Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into hosting a celebratory dinner. 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, a fictionalized memoir of the wife of the first Mason settler, who landed there in 1659. 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 crime against humanity did your family not commit on that land?” And so it is more or less inevitable that when the clan, joined by a cast of neighbors and French