Just in time for summer, Women’s Prize for Fiction has picked The Correspondent by Viriginia Evans as their 2026 winner. A perfect beach read, both light-hearted and serious, the novel is a series of letters, sent and received by the septuagenarian Sybil Van Antwerp. Sybil beautifully masters the art of letter writing and makes us all yearn for the days we wrote and received them ourselves. Through 11 years of correspondence with family, friends and a selection of random people, we get to learn about the ups and downs of Sybil’s life. A lovely, moving and melancholic book.
Our protagonist is not an altogether straightforward person. At times cantankerous and snappy, at times caring and thoughtful. A long, successful career in criminal law has hardened her. Rather than facing up to a tricky start in life and a life-changing, tragic event, she’s buried herself under a pile of work. By her own admission, she finds letter writing easier than talking to people. Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t done wonders for her relationship with her husband Daan and children, Bruce and Fiona, who have all decided to move far, far away.
What Sybil lacks in interpersonal skills, she more than makes up for in letter writing and this is where this book really excels. Three times a week, Sybil sits down and writes letters; to her gay brother Felix who lives in France, to the troubled but highly intelligent son of a former colleague, to her best friend, to authors she likes, to the head of the English department at the local university and, finally, to a mystery person whose identify emerges towards the end.
Evans creates believable, warts and all characters and paints a complete life based on snippets of communication; not an easy thing so do. She’ll make you lament the days of letter writing and the lost art of writing one, and wish you had one waiting for you in the mailbox.
‘…all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone’
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is published by Penguin, 320 pages.
