It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering for its annual dinner at the family’s 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 cousins from France, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should think and feel about their past comes to the fore.
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Reviews
“Over the course of four books, beginning with Mason’s Retreat, Tilghman has produced a wonderful saga about a Chesapeake family, incorporating a superb sense of place with expressive prose and complex interpersonal dynamics. This concluding volume unfolds with the Masons holding their annual gathering at their estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on July 4, 2019. . . . Amid introductions, reminiscences, and awkward dinner-table conversations, the smoothly-managed, omniscient viewpoint lets us glimpse each well-defined character, while Tilghman, through their eyes, offers thoughtful reflections on the weight of traditions and the Masons’ slave-owning past. While this novel can stand alone, it also has great respect for the series’ history, bringing many generational strands to a satisfying close.”
~ Sarah Johnson, Booklist
“As the descendants of the Mason family gather for their traditional meal of salmon and peas at the plantation home of their forebears (among the earliest settlers of the Chesapeake Bay environs), the time has come for a family reckoning. The legacy of all that was wrought over the course of several generations—displacement of the Indigenous population and the use of enslaved people as laborers among the most troubling practices—weighs upon members of the group to various degrees. . . . A cleareyed look at what history has hidden.”
~ Kirkus Reviews
“A faded estate on Maryland’s Chesapeake shore, packed with family members for a Fourth of July weekend and haunted by its history, provides the backdrop for Christopher Tilghman’s elegant, boisterous, and moving new novel, . . . teems with convincing characters: Kate and Harry, the owners grappling with mortality; their three grown children warring with respective partners; a pair of French cousins; a clutch of aged neighbors. Tilghman ranges through them—the inner life of a Vassar coed is as accessible to him as that of a 96-year-old Chesapeake matron—as they assemble for a gloriously described meal where buried conflict and sublimated pain inevitably intrude.”
~ Taylor Antrim, Vogue
“Tilghman’s four-volume chronicle of the Mason family, having spanned centuries and continents, ends, as it must, around a dinner table—a domestic idyll at which the ghosts of a brutal history, both national and familial, keep trying to pull up a chair. A moving capstone to one of the epic projects in recent American literature.”
~ Jonathan Dee