I finished Theo of Golden late one night and did what you do when a book gets under your skin: I went looking for more of the man who wrote it.
I found out Allen Levi had been a lawyer, then a judge, before laying it all down to write songs. So, I went hunting for his music, and found quiet, folk-tinged songs full of front porches, faith and the kind of small kindnesses most of us walk straight past. I listened to old interviews where he spoke so gently you had to lean in. I dug up an earlier little book of his called Oliviatown. Every trail I followed led to the same impression: this is a man who notices things, and loves what he notices.
And then I came across a book he’d written years before Theo ever existed. A memoir about his brother.
Finding it was another matter entirely. It wasn’t on any shelf near me. Online, copies were few and far between, and the ones I did find came with price tags that made me wince. I’ll confess I paid far more for this paperback than I have ever paid for a book in my life. I told myself I was being foolish. I was wrong. It turned out to be the most beautiful thing I’d read all year, and worth every last naira.
“The Last Sweet Mile” is the story of the year Allen spent walking beside his younger brother, Gary, toward the end of his life.
Allen and Gary were more than brothers. They were best friends. Both lifelong bachelors, both men of deep faith, one a lawyer who had traded the courtroom for a guitar, the other a missions worker who had spent his life criss-crossing the globe. Then Gary was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and told he had about a year.
You can guess how most books like this go. This one doesn’t.
Because the two brothers did something wonderfully simple. They set their work aside and chose to spend that year together. Long drives. Shared meals. Old family stories told one more time. Small errands that suddenly felt holy. Levi writes about it not as a tragedy but as a gift, and the most astonishing thing about this book is that by the end, you believe him. He calls that final year with Gary the best year of his life, and you close the book understanding exactly what he means.
If you loved Theo, you’ll recognise him here. All the gentleness, the attention to small graces, the conviction that ordinary people living ordinary days can be quietly heroic, it was all already there, in Allen’s love for his brother. Reading it felt like finding the root of the tree.
It is, above all, a sweet book. Sweet in the old-fashioned sense: kind, warm, unhurried. Levi has a songwriter’s eye for the telling detail, the joke a man always tells, the look that passes between two people who have known each other since boyhood. He wrote it first as a long letter to his family, so they would never forget who Gary was, and you can feel that. You’re not reading a performance. You’re being invited to the kitchen table.
Gary himself is a marvel. Not famous, not grand, just a man who spent his days loving God and loving people with an almost reckless faithfulness, right up to the very last mile. You’ll finish wishing you’d met him. You’ll also finish wishing you were a little more like him.
Yes, there is grief here, and you’ll want tissues for the final chapters. But it’s the kind of sadness that leaves you softer rather than heavier. Levi writes about death the way a man of faith truly sees it: not a wall, but a door, with someone you love waiting on the other side.
My one sorrow is how hard this book is to get. A story this tender shouldn’t feel like a rare treasure you have to hunt down and pay dearly for. Now that Theo has brought so many new readers to Allen Levi, I truly hope someone makes “The Last Sweet Mile” easier to find and easier to afford, because it deserves to be on every bookshelf, not just the lucky few.
I went looking for more of Allen Levi’s work, and I found his heart instead.
If Theo stole yours, let this book finish the job, however long it takes you to track it down.