The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is my top read so far this year. It is an epistolary novel consisting almost entirely of letters written to and from Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman in her 70s living outside Annapolis. Sybil is a bit prickly and cold, but as you learn through her correspondence with many people in her life – her brother, her children, her best friend, former colleagues, neighbors, and even famous novelists – there are reasons for her prickliness. I think it is best to go into this book without knowing much more than that. It’s a gorgeous, wise, heartbreaking book about life and its many, many regrets, and the possibility of redemption and connection even in later years. With epistolary novels, there’s always a fear that the author will tell too much of the plot through the letters (since there is no other way to do so), but Evans does a wonderful job of teasing the story out, usually offstage, while the letters serve more to delve into Sybil’s mind than to move the plot along. It’s a pretty quick read, one that I deliberately slowed down so that I wouldn’t race through it and the world that Evans built from Sybil’s writing desk. I just adored this book.