Christopher Tilghman Book order (chronological)

With the deep emotion and insight of “a true storyteller” (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times ), Christopher Tilghman, the author of the acclaimed Mason’s Retreat and In a Father’s Place , has written a powerful new novel of men and women, fathers and families. Eric Alwin has gone to visit his elderly father, a once commanding and charismatic Maryland senator who has seen his public service soured–and his family broken–by a sex scandal. Realizing that his own unfaithfulness, his disaffection with his career and marriage, seem to be a continuation of a family pattern, Eric is astonished to find his father proposing a bold expedition. The ensuing trip through the Deep South and the American heartland becomes both a journey into the emotional truth of the Alwin family and a breakthrough into a new kind of resilience and understanding, and love. Along the way, Eric will know anew not only his mother, Audrey, but his sisters, Alice and Poppy, and his own wife and son. As he discovers the surprising secret behind the scandal that defined his father’s fate, he will also realize what he must do to shape a more authentic and coherent life for himself. Christopher Tilghman’s Roads of the Heart is a brilliant achievement by an author who, grappling with the strains and discords of contemporary American culture, achieves a special understanding of how family members love and lose and find one another every day. From the Hardcover edition.

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.

Zwölf Short Stories nordamerikanischer Autoren: Paul Auster, Harold Brodkey, Ethan Canin, Robert Coover, Irene Dische, Andre Dubus, Deborah Eisenberg, Richard Ford, David Gates, Lorrie Moore, Robert Olmstead, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Tilghman und John Updike.

With a strong sense of place and family history, the stories in this stunning collection reach for a deeper understanding of fatherhood, embracing both the son's point of view and the father's. A true storyteller (Los Angeles Times), Christopher Tilgham probes the deepest source of feeling--familial, erotic, spiritual--in fiction of of impressive scope and maturity.