The Correspondent has become an absolute smash hit debut. Released in April this year to moderate fanfare, it has gathered momentum steadily. Some are calling it a sleeper hit, the kind where wonderful books find organic growth; a novel that didn’t explode immediately, but instead found its readers slowly, and then all at once.
This is Virginia Evans’s debut novel, written after nearly two decades of trying. Even moving from America to attended creative writing classes at Trinity College in Dublin in 2019. When she returned to the US and found herself adrift during the early days of COVID, she began writing every day. What emerged from that practice was The Correspondent.
An epistolary novel, told entirely through letters and emails, it follows Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73 year old woman who has spent her life writing. Sybil writes to everyone: her children, her neighbour, her best friend of 60 years, and to writers she admires, including Joan Didion and Ann Patchett. Through this rich web of correspondence, we slowly come to know Sybil’s life, her heartbreaks, her joys, her mistakes, what the art of letter writing means to her, and the moments that have shaped her.
This book is a beautiful musing on a life lived, on ageing, friendship, and family, on making amends and coming to terms with the parts of our lives that tested us. It is funny and heart warming, and equally devastating, capturing the essence of what it is to be human. You would be hard pressed to read it and not fall in love with Sybil, imperfections and all.
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