It’s barely March 1st when I’m writing this and this might be the biggest surprise read of 2026 for me. I listened to the audiobook which has a full cast recording, something I always appreciate to break up the monotony I sometimes feel of listening to the same voice for hours when listening to audiobooks. This epistolary novel has us following septuagenarian Sybil Van Antwerp through her hand written letters and email exchanges with her family, friends, customer service reps, authors, and basically anyone she fancied getting in touch with.
At surface level, that’s all this novel is, we follow roughly 10 years of letters during Sybil’s twilight years, which I was fine with, my mom has always said “a nadie le gusta el chisme más que a los hombres” which roughly translates to “no one loves gossip as much as men” and here I am proving her right, because for the first half of the novel I really enjoyed listening to all the gossip in Sybil’s life. During the second half, we start recognizing email and letter chains that make up the main story threads we’re following throughout the rest of the novel.
I started this novel knowing next to nothing about it other than it was an epistolary novel and that it was nominated and also won a bunch of awards last year. What I found was a deeply human, emotional novel that I really enjoyed. I’ve read some reviews of people disliking the novel because they dislike or sometimes even hate Sybil. Make no mistake, Sybil is not a perfect woman, far from it, but she is incredibly human in her feelings, her actions, her thoughts. She acknowledges her flaws while not compromising who she is, and this makes her a very interesting character. She’s not meant to be neither likeable or unlikeable, just like any one person would be in real life, it all comes down to personal preference. She’s stubborn, honest, a little rude, but also has a big heart, and capable of acknowledging her mistakes and shortcomings. I think we as humans all share these traits, it’s what makes us so complex that sometimes even we ourselves don’t know what we’re thinking or doing.
The last third of the book was particularly great for me, I won’t go into too much detail to avoid spoiling the book for others, but suffice it to say that I found the emotional payoff from the book’s conclusion to be very much worth it. I didn’t expect this book to make me emotional, but it did, the audiobook narration helped a lot in that regard, the actress playing Sybil did a fantastic job making her emotions come through in her narration.
If you think you can handle a flawed protagonist, I think you should give The Correspondent a try, it might surprise you as much as it did me.
Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆