Book Review: The Correspondent
A 2025 bestseller that’s worth the hype
At the end of 2025, Virginia Evans’ debut novel, The Correspondent, seemed to be everywhere. I saw it at the bookstore while Christmas shopping and found it listed among must-reads and best-seller lists as I started planning my 2026 reading list.
So, in preparation for my four-hour drive to visit family at Christmas, I cashed in an Audible credit on the audiobook version. It was one of my better life decisions.
The Correspondent isn’t like most novels you pick up. Instead of prose and dialogue, everything is communicated through correspondence — namely that of Sybil Van Antwerp, an opinionated, retired lawyer in her 70s who makes sense of her life and the world through writing. There are letters to her brother and children, emails to a customer service employee at an Ancestry.com-like website, notes to her best friend, neighbors and garden club. And over the course of all this correspondence, a story begins to unfold.
Sybil is strong and opinionated, the opposite of weak, but some of that is an armor she’s learned to wear to protect herself. As you get to know Sybil through her letters, notes and emails, you learn that she was adopted as a young child. She’s achieved great success in her life, but she’s also suffered immeasurable loss that has shaped her relationships in ways she knows and recognizes — and a few she has to uncover.
When Sybil starts receiving mysterious letters in her mailbox from someone her life intersected with in the past, she’s forced to deal with some of the things she’s been pushing down and repressing for decades, especially the death of her son, Gilbert, many decades before. As an older woman, Sybil begins to learn what it means to forgive others, and, most importantly, herself.
I finished listening to The Correspondent on New Year’s Day, standing in my kitchen. And when it was over, I cried. Not just because grief is such a big theme in the novel, but also because the book is simply beautiful. Somehow, through letters, notes and emails, Virginia Evans was able to give such a full picture of Sybil that I was sad when her story came to its logical conclusion. And, then, when Sybil’s final letter, found in her copy of Rebecca, comes to light, I was surprised and happy to find out my implicit trust in Sybil wasn’t misplaced in the end.
The Correspondent is about grief and the way it shapes a life, a current that continues to shape and form you long after the experience that caused it. But it’s also a story about hope and forgiveness, the things we want to say and the things we cannot always find the words to say.
A lot of novels become bestsellers, but Evans’ debut deserves the praise and attention it’s garnered. It’s a story about grief, but also, in the end, life.
Bookery Rating: 📙📙📙📙📙
An innovative approach to storytelling that quickly draws you in and helps you see how the experiences of a life — big, small, good and bad — are what makes it beautiful.
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