What it is: a tale told through letters
Did I like it: I loved it
This book had been on my i-want-it list for a while so the moment I spotted the paperback edition available it ended up in my shopping basket. It doesn’t fit any of the remaining reading challenge items but I wanted to read it nonetheless and am I glad I did because it was everything I hoped it would be and then some.
Sybil Van Antwerp is the correspondent of the title. Every other day she sits at her desk to write to, well, everybody. She has been writing letters since she was a young girl and has lost count of the number of letters she has written and received. Her story is told solely through her correspondence, outgoing and incoming.
For this as a trope to work it requires an interesting enough character that we can get to know them even through their own words. But fear not, because Sybil certainly is interesting and has a great way with words. Sybil is a mother and grandmother, a retired judicial clerk, avid reader and gardener. She is sharp, witty, outspoken and set in her ways. But at seventy-something she is confronted by some serious issues and is forced to reflect on her own behavior and events that happened in the past.
Sybil has always used her writing to process her thoughts and feelings and it shows because the story includes some unfinished letters as well. These parts confused me at first but the way it all folds together at the end was so well done it made me tear up.
Sybil’s writing is smart, funny, and heartbreaking. She exchanges letters and notes with anybody and everybody, from her neighbor, brother, and best friend, to a helpdesk administrator, her favorite authors, and the Dean of a university department.
The book is a love letter to letter writing and while Sybil encourages a young girl to start writing letters, she also warns that written words are immortal. (If only social media came with this warning.)
The story is set over a couple of years and you get to follow Sybil’s life through time and space. There are family issues, suitors, and friends in need. Sybil has experienced a lot of Life and even though some experiences happened decades earlier, the pain remains close to the surface, eventually bursting through.
I loved every page of this book: the setup was so well executed and even the minor characters came alive through their correspondence with Sybil. This was another one of those books where I wanted to savor every page yet blew right through it. The story easily could have gone fully dramatic or saccharine sweet but all praise to Virginia Evans for keeping it just the right amount of bittersweet. This book won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 and I completely understand why.
