Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay

October 08, 2025

No, Dear Mr Knightley isn’t the book I was struggling to read the other day. After reading over half of that one, I finally gave up. Instead, I moved on to Katherine Reay’s epistolary novel, Dear Mr. Knightley, a contemporary update to Jean Webster’s...

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

April 25, 2025

I can’t recommend Virginia Evans’ novel, The Correspondent, highly enough. If you like epistolary novels with a depth of character, meet Sybil Van Antwerp. Sybil is retired from practicing law. She’s divorced, a mother and grandmother who lives in...

Kate & Frida by Kim Fay

March 11, 2025

Kim Fay’s novel, Love & Saffron, was published in 2022, one of my favorite novels that year. It was subtitled “A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love”. I picked it up at the time because it was an epistolary novel, told in letters, and I’ll...

Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, food, and Love by Kim Fay.

February 07, 2022

I know marketing for books means someone is always going to compare a new book to a beloved or popular one. In this case, Kim Fay’s Love & Saffron was compared to 84, Charing Cross Road. I enjoyed Love & Saffron, and I’m recommending it to people...

The Lost Manuscript by Cathy Bonidan

February 07, 2021

Who do you give credit to when a novel in translation is beautiful and moving? Did I read Cathy Bonidan’s The Lost Manuscript? How much input did the translator, Emma Ramadan, have? I’ll never know, but kudos to both of them for the feelings this...