The Correspondent,
by Virginia Evans,
Published by Penguin Random House (2025)
Rating: **** (really, 3.7)
A life written in letters
Sybil Van Antwerp has spent most of her life doing what the title promises: corresponding. Most mornings, around half past ten, she sits down to write letters to family, to friends, to a university president who will not let her audit a class, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry, and to one person who never actually receives what she drafts. In The Correspondent, Virginia Evans turns this habit into form, offering an epistolary novel about the long afterlife of the things we commit to paper and the question of whether, very late in the day, forgiveness can still be written.
One of the book’s great pleasures is how ordinary Sybil’s voice is on the page. These are not vaulted, self-consciously “literary” letters, but the kind of correspondence that would not be out of place in a family archive: clear, practical, sometimes meandering, with occasional shafts of humour and sudden, disarming honesty. At its best, reading this novel felt like dipping into someone else’s inbox – an experience familiar to anyone who has stumbled across old emails or handwritten notes and found themselves lingering over the everyday as much as the dramatic.
Character, memory, and timing
Beneath the apparent lightness of the set-up, there is a more serious project underway. Letters from someone in Sybil’s past begin to arrive, forcing her back toward one of the most painful periods of her life and toward the unsent letter she has been, in effect, composing for years. Evans handles this slow reveal with a good deal of control: details are withheld and released with care, and it is often a throwaway line in one letter that gathers weight two or three sections later.
Sybil herself is a satisfyingly knotty late-life protagonist. She is capable, funny, occasionally prickly, and far from saintly; there are blind spots in her own self-understanding that the letters only gradually expose. Relationships are largely built in the negative space between what she chooses to narrate and what she leaves out, which feels right for a book about how we curate ourselves for others on the page.
When the letters misfire
For all that, the form does not always work in the novel’s favour. There are sections where you can feel the book working a little too hard to include particular exchanges from Sybil’s past. The schooldays correspondence with Rosalie, for instance, is ushered in quite smoothly – the transition into that earlier time in Sybil’s life is believable – but the transition out is much rougher, snapping us back to the present-day timeline before the emotional dust has really settled. The effect is mildly jarring, as though we have been shown a crucial folder and then had it slammed shut mid-perusal.
That pattern recurs elsewhere. Some letter-runs are anchored clearly in Sybil’s current preoccupations, and the movement between past and present feels organic. Others read more like backstory that needed a home, with the result that the overall rhythm of the book becomes uneven. The best epistolary novels often make productive use of gaps and jagged edges; here, the joins sometimes show.
A rushed final act
A similar unevenness appears in the pacing. For much of its length, The Correspondent proceeds at a careful, reflective tempo. Conflicts accrue slowly, the question of whether certain letters will ever be sent remains genuinely open, and the book is content to sit with Sybil’s ambivalence rather than resolve it. In the final 30–40 pages, though, the story accelerates dramatically. Long-deferred conversations happen, the fate of the unsent letter is decided, and various strands are tied off at a speed that feels out of step with the earlier patience.
By that stage, the broad outline of what has to happen is fairly clear; predictability in itself is not the problem. What disappointed me was the sense that, just as the novel’s core conflicts reach their most interesting pitch, the depth and granularity of attention fall away. The early letters do the slow, difficult work of showing how a person learns to live around an old wound; the ending, by contrast, seems more interested in ensuring that everything is resolved before the final page count. The result, for me, was a slightly thinner emotional payoff than the set-up deserved.
Reading through my own correspondence
All of this is coloured, inevitably, by the way the book intersected with my own history of letters. My parents wrote to each other before and after they were married, when distance and circumstance meant their lives ran in parallel more than they overlapped. Reading those letters as an adult has felt, more than once, like having live access to their love story, and to versions of them that do not yet know me. My father remains an excellent email writer; he has sent me long, reflective messages over the years that I have not always answered, something this book made me wince about more than once.
For a period, one of my closest friendships existed almost entirely on email, by choice rather than necessity. We built a relationship inside subject lines and sign-offs, with all the latency and generosity that asynchronous conversation permits. It made me appreciate and provide space for longform conversations through my life. Spending time with Sybil’s habit of sitting down, regularly, to write – even to people who will never read the words – left me wanting to recover that practice. I finished The Correspondent with a modest, but concrete resolution: to write more letters and emails, and perhaps to try, at least once a month, to be a correspondent in more than just the literary sense.
This is ultimately why, despite reservations about structure and pacing, the book landed at a 3.7 for me rather than a flat three. It is not, in my view, an unqualified triumph of the epistolary form, and Sybil will not displace my favourite fictional letter-writers any time soon. But there is something quietly valuable about a novel that, even in its imperfections, nudges you back toward your own drafts folder and the pile of unanswered messages on the desk.
Tejas Rao 