A letter-writing reading list
What to read next if you loved the Women's Prize-winning The Correspondent
As we discussed last letter, The Correspondent has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. A very worthy winner, and a book I’ve been recommending over and over again. It has gone out in our subscriptions to amazing feedback, and I have loved reading your thoughts and feedback. It’s also been passed reader-to-reader amongst our subscribers which is even more wonderful.
The Correspondent is told entirely through the letters the protagonist writes and receives - to her family, to customer services, even to Joan Didion. It’s a particular style that is hard to do, but when done well is charming.
I’ve found myself recommending a couple of books of where to go next, so if you’re interested in a letter-writing themed reading list this is for you.
As ever, if you join our subscription you get this kind of service personally tailored to you! We go back and forth on what you like, how you found the books, and what you might like to read next. The funnest part of my month is selecting and discussing what to send to our subscribers.
It also makes an excellent gift.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Despite its publication in April last year, this book’s fan base is still growing. I love that the winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction is still finding its fans. If you haven’t read it yet, this is your sign to.
What I loved most about this story wasn’t the structure, but the idea underneath it. The protagonist just writes to people - anyone and anywhere, with personality and humour. It reminded me of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers, which is about introducing more risk into your life and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone more often. Despite agreeing intellectually with this principle, The Correspondent did more to actually move me towards that.
I’ve been emailing people non stop since: to reconnect, to thank them, to send some compliments, and to let someone know what their work meant to me instead of just scrolling past. Email does feel like a poor substitute for an actual letter, but hey, baby steps.
I feel social media has made us all more passive in our consumption - we’re encouraged to scroll and not really engage. So now if there is an idea or a newsletter that I really like, I will always try to leave a comment, or a like, or recommend it, or share it onwards. I write this newsletter and The Outline weekly, and I cannot tell you how much it means when someone does this for me. It’s such a small yet generous thing to do, and The Correspondent brought this to life for me.
All of this sent me further down the letters and diaries rabbit hole this month, so if you loved this book here’s where I’d recommend you go next…
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
What a joy this book is. It had been on my list for ages, and I picked it up, freshly inspired by The Correspondent, on a recent trip to Tuscany.
This is not a novel, although it reads like one. It’s a literary autobiography - a real collection of letters that Hanff wrote across twenty years to a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London. Hanff is a New Yorker, broke, funny, and entirely unbothered by British formality. Watching her make it her mission to break through the bookshop’s politeness with sheer overfamiliar charm had me howling. She is the kind of person you’d want as a friend immediately, and she reminded me of Fran Lebowitz. Her Desert Island Discs episode is excellent.
Underneath the comedy, it is also properly moving. This is post-war London and Hanff’s American dollars stretch much further. She starts to send the bookshop staff food parcels, ordered from a catalogue out of the Netherlands, which the staff are stunned by. This builds a deep and moving relationship across the letters.
And for book lovers, there is so much book talk. Hanff is teaching herself what to read through this correspondence, asking the team to chase down her obsessions and obscure titles. It is, among everything else, a real education in how someone built an entire reading life through one good relationship with a bookshop.
The follow up - The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street - is about her eventual trip to London years later. This switches from letters to diary and is just as good.
I’m now on Q’s Legacy, which charts her English reading journey.
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
There are few Austen’s that I haven’t read, so this novella was a delightful recent discovery. Recently widowed, Lady Susan schemes her way through high society to find a new profitable match for herself - told through a series of letters across herself and her acquaintances. From knights begging their sons not to marry her, to her scheming for a boring match for her unfortunate daughter, this is full of the Austen wit and social skewering we know and love.
Lady Susan is a horrible flirt, in her thirties, and known seducer of men. What more could you want for a brilliant read, and there has been many a suggestion of Lady Susan being based on a real person. Written around the time of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, this was not published by Austen, and was later released by her nephew post her death.
All of this is really an extension of what we already do with the subscriptions. Choosing your book each month is the same instinct as writing a letter to someone you’ve never met - paying attention to one person and building something from there.
If you’d like that kind of attention paid to your reading list, join us here.
Happy Sunday.
Thank you again for supporting a small business, it means more than you know
Amazing! Great recommendations. Would love it if you shipped outside the UK! ❤️🥰