The Correspondent had a queue of 53 eager library borrowers at the time I put it on reserve; it was the ‘sleeper hit novel’ of 2025 according to review I read on the Internet. A epistolary novel, no less – I haven’t read one of those for a long, long time – and one could have thought a story told entirely in letters might be a hard sell, or a hard read. But no.
The correspondent of the title, Sybil Van Antwerp – retired chief clerk to an eminent judge, single, 73 years old – lives in a quiet leafy street in a Annapolis. She puts aside time every week to write letters. They can be witty, newsy, warm, sensitive, demanding or downright cranky; the different sides to her character and her relationships are there on the pages she posts or emails off to her gay brother Felix in Paris, her best friend Rosalie, a troubled teenage boy, a worker at a DNA testing company, a college president, a kindly neighbour, her son and daughter, her favourite authors…though there’s one letter, to the mysterious Colt, that never seems to get finished, or sent.
It’s clear that Sybil uses her letters to keep other people at bay, but over the nine years of correspondence in the novel, the reader sees her forced out of her comfortable, protective distance and into real life again.
Sybil is an engaging protagonist, with a complex backstory and plenty to write about, including not one but two determined suitors. I can see why the book has been so successful. I did enjoy it and certainly read it very quickly. One of those make- you-laugh, make-you-cry books that in retrospect leave me feeling a wee bit manipulated. Was the sentiment piled on a bit thick, or am I just a hard-hearted monster?