About the Book
Sybil Van Antwerp is seventy-three, slowly losing her sight and always writing letters . . .
To her children. Her favourite authors. Her ex-sister-in-law. The journalist poking into her past.
Her doctor. Suitors. Kindly neighbours. The infuriating gardening club.
All receive Sybil’s witty, wise correspondence, rich with everyday concerns.
But there is one letter that she has never sent. It concerns the darkest period of her life. To post it, Sybil must find forgiveness within herself.
The hardest letter to write is the one you’d never dare to send.
Format: Paperback (320 pages) Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: 10th June 2026 Genre: Contemporary Fiction
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My Review
If you’re part of the book world, or possibly even if you’re not, you’ll be aware of The Correspondent. It’s won literary prizes, topped bestseller lists and appeared again and again in readers’ ‘Books of the Year’ lists. What a disappointment then that my experience was rather different.
Inveterate letter writer Sybil Van Antwerp claims her letters are the story of who she is but in fact her letters are a carefully edited version of her life. The ‘real’ Sybil and her real story are contained within the unsent letter she adds to from time to time and that appears every so often between Sybil’s public letters. Despite a little camouflage, it wasn’t too difficult to guess the person to whom she was writing. I also worked out quite early on, thanks to an angry letter she sends to a newspaper editor, the true circumstances of the tragic event that occurred many years earlier and why it has overshadowed just about everything in her life ever since.
Sybil is a person of contradictions. She takes a personal interest in the lives of people she hardly knows, such as the customer service representative of a technology company, with sometimes unwelcome consequences for them, yet rarely communicates with her daughter. She can be obsessive, exemplified by her long campaign to continue to be permitted to audit a course in English Literature. Her letters to the Head of the Department become increasingly insistent but, ironically, when they meet face-to-face she gets on quite well with them.
I thought her preference for letters over telephone conversations showed a desire for control and to keep people at a distance. She even writes notes to her neighbour, the lovely Theodore.
From the blub I was expecting more humour. The bits that did make me laugh were Sybil’s tussles with her gardening club and her less than complimentary letter to author Kazuo Ishiguro informing him she felt Never Let Me Go wasn’t half as good as The Remains of the Day. Even here, there’s a sense of superiority. Perhaps others more generously would say chutzpah.
I struggled to feel any emotional connection with Sybil, although I was not without sympathy for the awful thing that happened to her. For me she was a rather sad, self-centred and embittered person. However, I appreciate I’m probably in the minority here and part of me feels bad for expressing negative thoughts about a book so many people have obviously loved.
This was a book club pick and it turned out members were pretty evenly divided between those who loved Sybil, those who didn’t and those with mixed feelings. So I wasn’t alone after all! The most common description of the book was ‘an easy read’. Personally, I expect a bit more literary ambition from a Women’s Prize-winning book although I admire the author’s bravery in trying to pull off an epistolary novel.
The book provoked an interesting debate about the demise of letter writing, or perhaps more specifically, of handwritten communication. The view was an email creates an expectation of an immediate response whereas letters do not. That letters require more thought and, as in Sybil’s case, may go undergo numerous drafts, whereas an email is often dashed off. Personally any email of importance I write undergoes plenty of redrafting so I’m not quite convinced it’s the format that makes the difference.
About the Author
Virginia Evans is from the East Coast of the United States. She attended James Madison University for her Bachelor’s in English literature. After starting a family, she went back to school for her Master’s of Philosophy in creative writing at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. She now lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, Mark, two children, Jack and Mae, and her red Labrador, Brigid. (Photo: Amazon author page)
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