The Widow and the Tree

In the mysterious country of coastal Alabama's backwater bays and slow-running rivers where bull alligators rumble the nerves of lesser creatures, stands Ghosthead Oak, a fabled giant tree that was a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. It is unlike any other tree along the whole coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola, and has kept watch over the widow's family land for five hundred years, a spirit guide and friend to her since childhood. Her father is buried in its shade. So why would she walk into a biker bar and hire a man with a yellow ballcap to wield his chainsaw and cut a gash around its trunk, to kill Ghosthead Oak with 30 minutes' work? This book is based on a true story. Sonny Brewer's fourth novel, The Widow and the Tree, provokes readers to consider the widow's dark deed as a sympathetic act, to ask might you have done the same thing?


Genre: Literary Fiction