The Correspondent

The Correspondent is an epistolary novel by the American writer Virginia Evans, published in April 2025 and the author's first published book.

The novel is made out of the letters and emails that Sybil Van Antwerp writes between 2012 and 2022. She is a retired lawyer, a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a divorcée, and writing letters is how she works out what she thinks: she writes to her brother, to her oldest friend, to the head of a university who will not let her audit the class she wants, and to writers such as Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry about the books she has just read. One correspondent is addressed again and again and none of those letters is sent, until post from her own past makes it necessary to go back to what she wrote.

Evans has said that the book began as a writing exercise that she did not intend anyone to read, and that the character of Sybil draws in part on her mother-in-law.