BOOK REVIEW: THE CORRESPONDENT By Virginia Evans (Penguin, 2025)
The winner of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction is THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans. It's an epistolary novel, told in a series of letters, emails, and messages, narrated by Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old woman. The novel has been a word-of-mouth sensation, a bit like Bonnie Garmus's LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY in 2022. Everyone has read it, and everyone wants to know if you have too. I'm usually wary of approaching such hyped novels, so I was relieved to find, when I finally picked it up, that I wasn't disappointed.
Sybil Van Antwerp has always been a letter writer. Even now, with failing eyesight, she keeps up her correspondence, diligently sitting down to write and respond three times a week. Her missives go out to all kinds of people: her best friend Rosalie, her brother Felix, the teenage son of a former colleague. Through her letters, we watch the narrator's character unfold. She is a widow and a retired lawyer who has enjoyed a full professional career, and she writes with the directness you'd expect from someone in her position, in a voice that is clear, old-school in its forthright no-nonsense-ness. "Thank you for your invitation to dinner, but 'no' is my answer, and you'll have no choice but to take it". This to a certain Mr. Watts, who is trying to woo her. Her directness makes the reader smile and wince at the same time. Her correspondence is also dotted with letters to someone unnamed, never sent and through the slow revelations we come to understand they are addressed to her son who died tragically at the age of eight, and it's here that her voice turns raw and emotionally open. While she comes across as terse and quick-tempered elsewhere, here she is unguarded, and it's this pairing, the brisk correspondent and the grieving mother underneath, that makes her so hugely generous, complex and yet open a character.
"Thank you for your invitation to dinner, but 'no' is my answer, and you'll have no choice but to take it"
Writing a novel in epistolary form is no small task. The author has to bring out the narrator's voice exactly as she'd want it heard, while guarding against the coldness and distance the form can create. Virginia Evans has finessed this balance, bringing lightness and agility to the voice of the aging Sybil even through the constraint of correspondence. The novel spans several years, moving back and forth between storylines which can at times be confusing to the reader. Sybil's slightly unrealistic love interests, the ups and downs of her legal career, and a DNA test that unravels her past followed by the discovery that she was adopted, and has a whole new family in England are all crammed into her life of letters. Through the letters, her complex relationships are unravelled. Her uneasy relationship with her daughter, her kinship with her brother, and a slightly confusing exchange with her ex-husband. We find out too about the small joys her life is filled with, the books she reads, the literature classes she likes to audit, the walks she takes in her garden in the moonlight. She also writes letters to real writers such as Anne Patchett and Joan Didion. This is a clever way of incorporating the fictional world into the real. Through all of this and more, Evans draws a rounded portrait of a full and complex life.
The narrative takes off slowly but picks up fast, and soon we're embroiled in all the complications and intricacies of Sybil's life. Evans draws out her characters delicately and skilfully, and the novel's revelations come together neatly at the end. My only reservation was that despite everything I didn’t seem to warm to the main character, or for that matter to any of the other characters. This is I believe more a failing of the epistolary form than a reflection of the author’s skills.
Reviews have raved about the honesty and delight of THE CORRESPONDENT, ad rightly so, its an interesting, easy read which appeals to many. It's also a quiet argument for returning to older forms of writing and corresponding. Like many other readers, I found myself wanting to pick up a pen and write to my friends and family. Perhaps, in this age of AI, that's the way forward.
THE CORRESPONDENT By Virginia Evans (Penguin, 2025)