The Correspondent is a 2025 epistolary novel by Virginia Evans, winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer. Letter writing has been a passion since she was young. Her letters have gone out to all sorts of people – friends and family obviously, but also to famous authors – P.L. Travers, Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, Larry McMurtry, amongst others. And these people reply. So that was fun. It was also interesting. Usually we think of a novel as a one way method of communication. Here it’s much more of a conversation.
Authoring is different to letter writing. A letter is for one person. A book has to try and manage the trick of feeling relevant to lots of people at the same time. And when you review a book, you are dealing with something that has become separate from the person who wrote it, which is maybe why people write bad reviews so easily. They forget that an actual individual spent years at a desk somewhere tapping on a keyboard. So there is an impersonality on both sides. The Correspondent reminds us that there are real people involved, and a novel is an invitation to conversation between them. Certainly I feel that in writing down my thoughts about a book – replying to the author in effect – I get more out of it. And fittingly there are discussion topics included at the end of The Correspondent.
Maybe it is good to be reminded that an author is an actual person, just like a reader. This book brings those two usually distant correspondents closer together. Certainly, mutual understanding is a major theme of Virginia Evans’ book. There, I have used her name. Well done, Virginia.
The Correspondent is funny, moving and interesting on the business of communication. What’s not to like? And it gives good book recommendations – I’m going to read Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry at some point.
A Month in the Country is a novel by J.L. Carr, nominated for the 1980 Booker Prize. The setting is Oxgodby, a Yorkshire village, during the beautiful summer of 1920. Art restorer Tom Birkin arrives to uncover a medieval mural at the local church. He is a veteran of the First World War, suffering the effects of shell shock, or combat stress as it would be called now. Tom’s marriage is also causing him misery. The hope is that a month living in lovely summer countryside working on a painting will restore Tom’s spirits.
I read the book during a heatwave in July 2026. Enjoying all the descriptions of summer – deep red hollyhocks pressed against limestone walls, velvet butterflies flopping lazily from flower to flower – it struck me that summers like this can’t really happen anymore. Hot days are now experienced with climate concerns in the background, making it difficult to appreciate those hollyhocks in quite the same way. It’s all red warnings for extreme heat and sleep deprivation. Finishing the book, wondering what to say about it, I glanced at the BBC website and read an article about the ambulance service, where the number of call-outs tracks rising temperatures.
Back to writing my review, while the summer of 2026 is difficult to see in wholly positive terms, the same is actually true of summer 1920 as described in A Month in the Country. The beauty and peace of that blissful August exist in relation to the experiences of war that came before, and Tom’s continuing marriage troubles that we feel might be coming after. This few weeks of light is brought into focus by surrounding darkness. The suggestion is you can’t have one without the other.
Alright, adjust the desk fan, and let’s have a think about the picture that Birkin is restoring. Initially this painting of the Final Judgement does not seem to be expressing wishy-washy modern sentiments about good and bad as relative qualities, each defined by the other. The Final Judgement shows the bad going to Hell, the good ascending to Heaven, people getting what they deserve, because good is good, bad is bad, and there’s no fussy, fancy grey area in between. Meanwhile, back in the real world Tom meets Charles Moon, another war veteran, who has been given the job of locating a lost grave in the churchyard. This is a man, a recipient of awards for bravery in rescuing injured men from the battlefield, who found himself court-martialled and imprisoned once his homosexuality was discovered. This hero criminal was judged by people who were villains themselves. How does Moon’s experience sit with a conception of life dividing people into sinners or saints? And going back to the painting itself, its apparently black and white morality is actually subtly undercut by various cunning little details. For example, the people falling to Hell are depicted much more vibrantly than the troop of dowdy souls moving dutifully up to Heaven.
So, the heatwave in July 2026 was a fitting time to read the elegiac, charming, gently subversive, quietly funny book that is A Month in the Country. Summer, the epitome of peace is not so peaceful anymore, and Carr’s book suggests that peace is always associated with its turbulent opposite.
The Horse is a 2024 novel by American writer Willy Vlautin. Al, a singer-songwriter, has had a long career in the music business with periods working as a chef. After some highs and many terrible lows, he finds himself in his sixties living on the site of a remote, disused mine in Nevada, which he inherited from a member of his family. It’s the middle of winter and Al’s accommodation is a shack that used to be the ‘assayer’s office’. An assayer is an official who tests the purity and value of precious metals found in rock dug out of the mine. Al looks back at his life and acts as something of an assayer himself, looking at what happened to him, trying to find value amidst a great deal of rubbish. Meanwhile outside his shack there is an abandoned horse standing in the snow. Al, a humane sort of chap, tries to work out how to save the horse.
Finding gold is not easy, as shown by the occasions when Al mentions precious metals in his reminiscences. At one point he plays guitar in an outfit called Gold ‘n Silver, the worst band he was ever involved with. Gold ‘n Silver abandon him after he collapses on stage. The lead singer of another of his bands has a breakdown at a venue called Gold Dust West. Al smokes Old Gold cigarettes, which along with alcohol don’t do him any good. A casino venue in Carson City where Al fills in after a band loses their guitar player to a stabbing, is called the Nugget. All that glisters is clearly not gold.
Meanwhile Al is always trying to write songs based on his life experiences. He is good at this, and sometimes when things go really well, he writes something special, which feels like “a little bit of gold” – precious metal made out of the ordinary rock of his life.
Al struggles on, exploring his life story, and trying to save the horse. His efforts make for a fascinating and very readable meditation on what value means.
A book review is an assayer of sorts, and this assayer suggests that The Horse is a little nugget of the good stuff.
In the TV show Schitt’s Creek, the wealthy Rose family are left destitute when their business manager is charged with embezzlement. Moving to a small town, called Schitt’s Creek, they end up living in a motel. Despite a rocky start to their new life, the Roses soon find the town’s folk accept them for who they are, rather than for how much money they might, or might not, have. This acceptance extends to the Rose’s bisexual son David, who finds love in Schitt’s Creek, when he couldn’t find it in New York.
I loved the show, but there was something about it that puzzled me. Why was this small town so liberal and tolerant? In reality rural towns tend to be conservative places. It’s not made clear which country Schitt’s Creek is in, but if we imagine it’s an American town, then this is the sort of place providing a generous source of votes for Donald Trump. Election maps show a stark divide between liberal, densely populated cities and conservative, sparsely populated countryside. Social scientist, Jonathan Rodden of Stanford University has recently published a book, called Why Cities Lose, trying to explain this split. There are various theories – some going back into history: one idea suggests that people with personalities more open to new experience headed for the nineteenth century’s emerging industrial towns, while those of a more cautious, conservative bent tended to stay on the farm.
This urban rural divide has become increasingly deep in recent times, exacerbated by voting systems which give excessive weight to physical size of voting area. The fact that liberal-voting city dwellers are packed into small areas, can give them less electoral clout compared to fewer rural voters spread out in larger spaces. This is a particular problem in the United States, where Democrat candidates can win with massive majorities in urban areas, but lose by slim margins in many rural locations. With a first past the post system, the result is fewer seats for Democrats than their individual votes would actually represent, which is how Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, even though she had a popular vote advantage of nearly three million. This all contributes to a wider political divide between city and countryside than would otherwise be the case if individual votes carried equal weight.
How to overcome this divide? Schitt’s Creek has a go by disguising a racially diverse, culturally tolerant city, as a small town. Despite frequent linking shots of out-of-the-way grain silos and quiet railway crossings, there is much of the nature of a densely packed city existence in Schitt’s Creek. The Rose family are thrown together physically, in two neighbouring motel rooms, when up until now they have led isolated lives in luxury apartments. They are also obliged to live and work closely with various different sorts of people around them.
So, is this city-like town just a delightful fantasy? Is it a way of escaping the painful realities that are dividing many countries, America especially? Partly I think the answer is yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that. After all, urban life has pitfalls. The economic advantages of a city can create great wealth, and there is nothing like money for cutting people off in an entitled bubble. The Roses are not bad people, but they did fall into the isolating money trap during their glory days. A small town is a good place to strip away the wall of wealthy sophistication, and get back to relating to people in a more real, down-to-earth way. Johnny Rose, former head of the massive Rose Video chain, takes an interest in the dilapidated motel that has become his home, and starts working with its manager to try to make improvements. This means cleaning rooms, and working on the reception desk. Johnny’s son, David, opens a shop where he learns that you have to welcome customers, rather than keeping them away in the interests of exclusivity. Johnny’s daughter, Alexis, finds herself in a real relationship with the local vet, in contrast to her wealthy life, which had her moving through a series of high-profile but empty liaisons. Johnny’s wife, Moira, once a TV soap star, finds herself working with locals in singing groups and amateur drama productions. Compared to her life on the soap, where she seemed to spend most of her life drunk, Moira’s amateur theatrics are a welcome improvement.
In the end, understanding and acceptance of others is the key, and Schitt’s Creek suggests that aspects of both city and rural life can help us with that. The trick is to combine the best, and limit the downsides, of both.
If you haven’t seen the show I won’t give away the outcome, other than to say that if the Roses learnt a few things living in Schitt’s Creek, I learnt a few things watching them. Bravo, Dan and Eugene Levy, and their great cast. You made a show for our times.
Writing And So On 