The Correspondent – Virginia Evans

READ FOR WOMEN’S PRIZE

Sybil Van Antwerp is an elderly former lawyer whose life is revealed through letters and emails to family, friends and acquaintances. When someone from her past reappears, Sybil is forced to revisit a painful period in her life. Through her correspondence, the novel explores ageing, grief, family, forgiveness and regret, and the ways our understanding of the past can change over a lifetime.

Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

RACHEL
●  I’m not a fan of epistolary novels. I find letters a bit of a cop out, used as a replacement for writing ability. And I find things are unrealistically over explained because there is no narrator to provide back story. For example “I came to your house on the weekend, we had shepherd’s pie for dinner and three glasses of wine and then I told you all about the affair” (not a quote from the book, couldn’t bear going back to find an example). This is not how people write letters. I’m pretty sure the receiver knows the sender came for dinner, they ate shepherd’s pie, drank wine and talked about the affair.

I was on the back foot from the outset with The Correspondent and events such as these didn’t endear it to me at any time.

It sounds strange but I felt like the characters were characters. At no time did they feel real to me and I did not feel connected to them, even when tragedy struck. Which is a shame, because the plot is full and well constructed with interesting twists, revelations and interconnected threads, but the format made it feel like the mechanics of the storytelling were visible. I want to get lost in a story and have to piece together the truths and lies, not be able to see how its been constructed and have the unreliable narrator so exposed. If this book had been presented in a more traditional format, where the author had the ability to build and layer emotional impact, it could have been a me type of book.

Published 2025
Crown Publishing
285 pages