The Correspondent made all the best lists for 2025 - and with good reason! This story is told completely through letters, notes, and emails. Sybil Van Antwerp has been a letter writer her whole life. Anyone who wants to communicate with her better be prepared to write it out. These communications give us a look at Sybil’s personality, her relationships, her pet peeves, her thoughts on books she’s read, her lifelong regrets, and other events in her life. Sybil is definitely not shy with her opinions! And her command of language is genuinely impressive. The Correspondent follows Sybil through the later season of her life as she begins to lose her sight, a devastating development for someone so connected to reading and writing. Interwoven in the story is, perhaps, the most important letter she’s ever written, even if it remains unsent.
This book is captivating. The accolades are genuinely deserved. From embedded book recommendations to communications with authors, The Correspondent introduces you to someone you really want to meet, to know, to communicate with. To be. Someone who has made the most of life, yet has regrets and made mistakes. Someone who can come to terms with all of it. LOVED this book!
Review by Laura L
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The Correspondent
Throughout her life Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings around half past ten Sybil sits down to write letters--to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. A mother, grandmother, wife, divorcée, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.