Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I was at the park the other day, and I saw

someone with a copy of the novel, The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans. It was a brand new copy,

fresh from the bookstore, a few blocks up. I chatted her up about it, and it was for her book club,

and she was excited to dig into it. I suspect she's not alone in her

enthusiasm. I'd guess that more than a few of you have read it. For a book that came out almost

a year ago now, it's become kind of a runaway hit, nobody in the publishing industry

saw coming. If you don't know, it's about a woman in her 70s, and it's told through the letters.

She writes to her friends, to strangers, and it's told through the letters.

She writes to her friends, to strangers, and loved ones.

Author Virginia Evans talks to here and now is Robin Young about the book success and what it's done for the letter writing industry after the break.

I know when the news goes into overload, I find refuge with good books. So a few minutes now on arguably the most popular novel in the country. It's the top fiction bestseller in the New York

Times, the most requested book at the Chicago Public Library. The Arizona Republic lists it as one of the

most anticipated books of 2026. But the correspondent by Virginia Evans came out almost a

year ago. It's spreading by people asking, as two of the book's characters do, what are you

reading? That's the way they've ended letters to each other since childhood, and it's part of a

trove of letters that tell this story, exchanges between 70-something Sibyl Van Antwerp and her garden club, a customer service rep, or the suicidal son of a colleague.

Famous authors like Joan Didion and Anne Patchett, all of whom she befriends in letters she's been writing since childhood on perfect stationary with perfect pens, but an

imperfect world is pressing in on her. We see that Sybil's controlled prose, as good as some of

the authors she writes to, is covering a terrible grief as well as guilt over the loss of a child.

As the real Anne Patchett writes about the correspondent, it's a book about how one woman

changes at a point where change seems impossible. My college roommate couldn't put the correspondent

down. That's when I picked it up. It is remarkably Virginia Evans' debut novel. Virginia,

...