This is Amazon’s #2 Best Book for 2025
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The Correspondent is an epistolary novel. Most of the letters that make up the book are written by Sybil Van Antwerp, but some of them are written to her instead. We learn that Sybil has had a lifelong practice of writing letters. Her letters often go to her brother, her sister-in-law, her children, and her former work associates. But she also writes to others including authors Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry.
We get to see all the letters and through them we learn that Sybil is in her seventies. She is retired from a profession in law, where she had worked mainly as the chief clerk to a judge with whom she had once been in private practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children. There was also a third child, Gilbert, who died when he was eight-years-old.
That last sentence is so easy to state, and so difficult for Sybil to experience. This fact goes on to impact many areas of her life – as of course we would expect. And yes, if many other reviewers call Sybil cantankerous, this simple and horrifying fact plays into that as well.
Besides learning all of Sybil’s back story, things going on in her current life are also interesting to explore. As she tells us, “Everything was going along without a single blip on the radar for years and BAM! CHAOS!”
Part of the chaos includes not one, but two possible suiters for the septuagenarian. And it brings her some long-lost relatives, and it even resolves a long-ago legal case for which she could never forgive herself.
Thus, the chaos that comes her way is all good stuff, and for this I was happy. Though she is indeed a crusty character, she is also a very loveable one. I rooted for her through the whole book.
It is easy to see why this novel is #2 in the top 20 books of 2025 according to Amazon. I recommend it.
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Click here to learn more about The Correspondent.
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Looking for your next book to read? Please consider my newest book, Chai on Life. “Chai” is a mystical word in Hebrew. It is pronounced “high” making this book High on Life with a Jewish slant. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon.
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