Critical Praise

"Christopher Tilghman is a novelist’s novelist in that he can hold the years in his head and then deal them out in a layered story so achingly gracious and incisive that it becomes for a week in a reader’s house the very reason for the chair, the lamp. Offered in Tilghman’s astonishing prose, the story of this place --- focusing on two families, two races, the history of a peach orchard, and a love that is both natural and forbidden --- is a reader’s deep pleasure. The story flows inexorably through the insistent harm of the period, which is brought to such life that we see it is really our own. This is a big, wonderful novel."

"This is bold storytelling --- a man spends a day listening to tales of the past that become an eloquent set of voices sailing through his imagination and into an intimate history of a place called Mason’s Retreat. It’s a wonderful novel, unfolded in elegant and precise language."

"A rare achievement. Christopher Tilghman’s vision of the American past --- and particularly of individuals caught in the tidal sweep of history --- is dazzling in its precision and clarity."

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