The Poet of Tolstoy Park

By Sonny Brewer

For the reader interested in end of life issues, written in lavish yet accessible prose, this fictionalized account of a true story is my most recent pick.

The author is Sonny Brewer, owner of Over the Transome Bookshop in Fairhope, Alabama and, among other efforts, editor of Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe

 Henry Stuart's doctor gives him a year to live. He thus begins a "journey," one of physical relocation to a warmer climate, but also a journey of reflection on which the reader is invited. His thoughts are anything but conventional, and to those who love him, confounding. He moves to Fairhope, Alabama away from close friends and family but where he finds a crossroads of thought and philosophy that both fits him and sustains him for years beyond the doctor's prediction.

The author says that two thirds of the story comes from his own imagination, yet the blend of history and fiction reads seamlessly. Sonny Brewer's writing is rich to the point of, at first, distracting this reader. But ten pages into the novel I accepted the story as one of unique texture and setting that nourished all the senses. I finished the book with a sense of "reader's remorse" that there was no more.