The TITLE Review

Recommended by Lin, one of our most well-read customers who insisted that this was a book not to be missed. She was right. Again.

There is a particular kind of grace that shows up unannounced. It happens in a coffee shop, in front of a wall of pencil portraits, when a stranger with no obvious business in town decides to buy them all back for the people they belong to.

Theo of Golden

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden built its readership the way these things used to happen: one reader telling another, then another and so on. Self-published in 2023, it took several years to reach the top of a bestseller list it had no obvious right to be on.

What is it about?

An elderly man named Theo arrives in the small Southern town of Golden with no explanation of where he's from or why he's come. At the local coffeehouse, ninety-two pencil portraits of the town's residents hang on the walls. Theo begins buying them, one by one, and returning each to the person it depicts. In exchange, he asks for nothing but their story. That is more or less the whole plot, and it is enough. Each portrait becomes a door into a life: a young accountant stuck in a career she never wanted, a marriage gone quiet, a grief no one has been allowed to name out loud. Theo listens to all of it, and somehow that listening is the thing that moves people.

Why we like it:

There's no plot twist saved for later, no rug pulled out from under you. What Levi offers instead is patience, a willingness to give each person Theo meets exactly as much time as their story needs. It's unabashedly tender, occasionally sentimental, and entirely sincere about it. In a season of noise, there's something disarming about a book that just wants to pay attention to people.

By the end, Theo has changed a whole town without ever raising his voice, which feels like its own quiet reminder for what kindness can do.

You'll love it if you enjoyed:

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, another quiet story about an older character taking stock of a life, or A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, gruff exterior, soft center, whole neighbourhood transformed.

Pick up a copy in store at TITLE Barangaroo or Surry Hills, or here.