Since Virginia Evans‘ debut novel “The Correspondent” was published in April 2025, it has become a phenomenon. The novel topped the New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover fiction in February, and it is among the most requested books at the Chicago Public Library.
The book is having a viral moment because people are asking, as two of the book’s characters do, “What are you reading?” That’s the way Sybil and a friend have ended letters to each other since childhood, and it’s part of a trove of letters, exchanges between the 70-something Sybil Van Antwerp and her garden club, a customer service rep, the suicidal son of a colleague, or famous authors like Joan Didion and Ann Patchett, whom Sybil befriended through letters written on perfect stationery, with perfect pens.
But an imperfect world is pressing in on her. We see that Sybil’s controlled prose, as good as some of the authors she writes to, is covering a terrible grief, as well as guilt, over the loss of a child.
As the real Ann Patchett writes about “The Correspondent,” ‘It’s a book about how one woman changes at a point where change seems impossible.’
8 questions with Virginia Evans
What’s it been like to see Sybil embraced a year after being published?
“She’s just soaring, isn’t she, all over the world? I do think of her kind of as a real person. And it has been the surprise of a lifetime.
“You publish a novel and you’ve never published a novel before, and my expectation was that it would come out and we would sell some copies and that would be enough.
“Here we are selling and selling and selling more copies than I ever imagined we would sell.”
Who would you say Sybil is?
“I would say Sybil is a woman who has lived with grief for a long time and disappointment. But that’s not all that she is. She’s funny and she’s very smart and she’s very kind and she’s a little misguided at times.”
She has a quaint way of speaking. It’s very formal, like how an older woman might speak on Masterpiece Theater.
“I think the way Sybil curates her communication in letters is not, I imagine, necessarily how she speaks. There’s something really beautiful about her habit of correspondence, but there is also something about it that she’s always editing herself. Her written self is so proper and so perfectly articulated, and I think some of that is authentic, but some of that is her being very careful to keep it all looking quite perfect on the outside.”
Are people telling you they’re writing more letters?
“Yes, it is amazing. There’s some statistics that there’s been more mail circulating. That is so thrilling. There’s something about the vehicle of letters in the story that provides this beauty.
“So, I’m a letter writer. I think there is something so beautiful and permanent and timeless about receiving a letter and keeping a letter. And it is an artifact. If somebody reads this book and sends a letter that says something meaningful, that uplifts someone in their [life]. I mean, that feels like the best possible result from all of this.”
Can you please read a paragraph from one of the letters.
“This is from an early letter Sybil is writing to Joan Didion.
“She says, “In response to your second more complex question, I’ve sat and thought for nearly a week, how does it all feel to me now? I suppose there is this one part of it which is Gilbert never left me, and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished. And as I age, it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don’t have the slightest inkling that he ever lived. I had him for so much less time than I’ve lived without him. And yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself. It is as if I have swallowed a hot air balloon. But try not to let on.’
“And there she’s talking about the death of her son when he was 8 years old.”
In your author acknowledgments, we find out a real loss of your dear friends. You write, ‘Six-year-old Wade died and time stopped’. Can you tell us about Wade’s impact?
“I’m so happy that you asked. I love to be able to talk about Wade. We have these great friends and their son became sick. He passed away. He was 6 years old. It’s hard to even articulate.
“But it was an act of the imagination, you know, to take it to having lived with that sadness for 40 years [as Sybil did].
“I became very, very thoughtful and careful about a parent or parents losing a child and what it can feel like and what it doesn’t feel like. And they were so enthusiastic for me to include that in the acknowledgments.
“I remember his mother saying to me, ‘Any person who gets to read my son’s name, because they read it in the back of your book, that is an added gift to me in my life. It just lets his name be repeated and repeated and read and read.’”
Why a whole book of letters? You call out authors, including John Williams and his book ‘Stoner.”
“I love a book, and letters. I think it’s such a generous vehicle for the reader because there’s so much space to turn the page and take a breath and change your perspective. It really started there and then it was kind of this question of, ‘OK, well, what story can you tell through letters? Like whose story could be told in this quaint, old-fashioned way?’
“It’s interesting you mentioned ‘Stoner’ by John Williams. That book really was part of the inspiration behind this book because at the beginning of ‘Stoner,’ there’s that one- page sort of summary of his life for his obituary sort of at the beginning, and it seems very dull. And then the whole book is the story of his life and how compelling it is. Even though it seems one dimensional, it’s not.
“That really was part of the inspiration with this book: Pick somebody out of the world who you think that would be a boring story to tell and see, ‘Can you show how that’s not a boring story because nobody’s story is boring?’ And so I thought, ‘OK, if you take a woman who’s in her seventies and eighties, she’s retired, she’s divorced, she lives alone, keeps to herself, pretty set in her ways. And can you tell the story of her life that is interesting?”
How did you, at 39, know about that part of older age?
“I don’t know. I think there’s so many wonderful women in my life who I’ve sat around listening to. I just. I just love to be in conversation with people older than me. I just have enjoyed listening, having people older than me kind of show me the way and also imagination. And I was thinking about this actually recently, how much reading fiction gives you the empathy and the perspective to understand. I was just reading Ann Patchett’s ‘Whistler’. [The story is] a lot about people aging and reflecting and having this hindsight on choices that they made, ways they treated other people, and just the sort of wisdom that comes with age. Maybe I just have an old soul. That’s something that I’ve been told through my whole life.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
Book excerpt: ‘The Correspondent’
By Virginia Evans
Excerpted from “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans. Copyright © 2026 by Virginia Evans. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR