Two small birds perched on a fence, The Correspondent emblazoned on the cover in a simple Serif—if you’re a reader, you've seen that visual all over 2025’s must-read lists. Writer Virginia Evans’s debut novel, published in April last year, has become a sleeper hit. It made it to The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction in December and has been at #1 for the past three weeks. It’s a spot that’s hard-won and well-deserved, and here’s why it’s our book of the month.
The two things that stand out about this book are its protagonist and the novel’s unique structure. The former is a complicated 70-something woman living by herself in a town in Maryland, USA. Sybil Van Antwerp is not your regular sweet old grandmother. Instead, she’s a retired whip-smart lawyer, divorced, living alone, but certainly not lonely, thanks to the stream of correspondence—beautiful, sweet letters—she maintains with everyone from friends and family to a customer-support executive at a DNA testing company and a teenage pen pal. This brings us to the second reason to love this book—it’s an epistolary novel, written entirely in the form of letters to and from Sybil. Scroll for more on our March book of the month and an interview with the author, below.
