When author Virginia Evans wrote The Correspondent, she didn’t hold back, but she also didn’t expect her debut book to become a bestseller.
“I didn’t think I was going to publish this book,” Evans, 39, said during a January episode of “The Book Review Podcast” from The New York Times. “I had been writing books for a long time that had not been successful, and I had a book out for sale to editors, and it was not selling. And so I wrote this book, what I was calling a palate cleanser. I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna write a book that’s just a book I wanna write.’”
The Correspondent was Evans’ eighth complete novel. Once she decided to write it for herself, the project became “such an exercise of getting all the things out of me that I wanted to get out, draw out.” However, much of what she wrote she now considers “pretty reckless.”
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“I think I had the courage to do that because I didn’t think anyone would ever see it. I didn’t have any intention of giving it to my agent,” she noted. “I was just going to write it and then tuck it away.”
Evans’ agent ultimately insisted on reading the book, and The Correspondent was published as her debut in April 2025. The novel follows a retired lawyer in her 70s named Sybil Van Antwerp who reflects on her life through letter and email correspondences with her friends, family and famous authors over the years.
The Correspondent eventually became a New York Times bestseller, spending 13 weeks on the list as of January. As one of the most popular books of 2025, it continues to find new readers, with Katie Couric choosing it as her inaugural book club pick earlier this month.
In her podcast interview, Evans credited author and Parnassus Books owner Ann Patchett’s support for The Correspondent’s breakthrough.
“There was a moment when, in the summer, I believe, Ann Patchett was on PBS NewsHour, and she talked about the book,” Evans recalled. “And that felt gigantic to me.”
The Correspondent’s success became even more apparent to Evans once she met readers and booksellers on tour.
“And then, probably as I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people and everybody I talked to on the road in bookstores … they were starting to say, ‘This is becoming a thing. We can’t keep it in the store,’” she continued. “But I think I just didn’t have a context. I still don’t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop, I think.”
For Evans, the timing was right for The Correspondent to launch her career.
“I feel like I lucked out. Like, I got it all,” she explained. “I got to have my life and my family. And now at this moment, I get to have this other amazing dream come true.”
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