List_of_contemporary_epistolary_novels

List of contemporary epistolary novels

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An epistolary novel tells its story through correspondence, letters, telegrams, and the like. Here are some examples of contemporary epistolary novels:

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Author	Title of Work	Year	Format	Other Comments
Adiga, Aravind	The White Tiger	2008	Letters	Written as a series of letters to "His Excellency Wen Jiabao, The Premier's Office, Beijing"
Ahern, Cecelia	Where Rainbows End	2006	E-mail, letters, and notes
Ahern, Cecelia	Love, Rosie	2005	Letters and emails
Atkins, Tracy R.	Aeternum Ray	2012	Letters	A series of letters chronicling an immortal man's life from 1979 to 2216, forming a post-technological-singularity memoir
Avi	Nothing But the Truth	1991	Dialogue transcripts, telephone conversations, letters, telegrams, diary entries, and memos
Bâ, Mariama	Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter)	1980		Considered a classical statement of the female condition in Africa
Bantock, Nick	Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence	1991	A series of postcards and letters inside envelopes	Originally the first book in a trilogy, The Griffin and Sabine Saga, Bantock wrote another trilogy in the same format to extend the story in The Morning Star Trilogy
Barth, John	LETTERS	1979	Letters from seven writers, some addressed to the "author", plus one will codicil
Bauer, Wolfgang	The Feverhead	1967	Letters of two friends that cross all the time, ending in a mise en abyme
Beaumont, Matt	e	2000	E-mail
Bellow, Saul	Herzog	1964	Letters	Real and imagined letters written by the protagonist Moses E. Herzog to family members, friends, and celebrities
Berger, John	From A to X: A Story in Letters	2008	Letters	Letters from A'ida to her imprisoned insurgent lover, Xavier
Brooks, Geraldine	March	2005	Letters
Bull, Emma and Steven Brust	Freedom and Necessity	1997	Letters and diary entries
Butler, Octavia E.	Parable of the Sower	1993	Diary entries
Butler, Octavia E.	Parable of the Talents	1998	Diary entries
Cabot, Meg	The Boy Next Door (Boy, #1)	2002	Emails	First in series of four books.
Cabot, Meg	Boy Meets Girl (Boy, #2)	2004	Emails, letters
Cabot, Meg	Every Boy's Got One (Boy, #3)	2005	Emails, letters, journal entries
Cabot, Meg	The Boy is Back (Boy, #4)	2016	Texts, emails, journal entries
Card, Orson Scott	Ender's Shadow Saga	1999	emails	Each chapter begins with a correspondence between two characters with limited context, then segues into traditional narrative
Cary, Kate	Bloodline	2005	Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles	A sequel to Dracula and thus mimicks the writing format of Bram Stoker's classic novel
Chbosky, Stephen	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	1999	Letters
Chrostowska, SD	Permission	2013	one-way correspondence
Cleary, Beverly	Dear Mr. Henshaw	1983	Letters and diary entries
Coady, Lynn	The Antagonist	2011		Monologic epistolary novel conveyed through increasingly unanswered email messages
Comeau, Joey	Overqualified	2009	Job application letters
Coupland, Douglas	Microserfs	1995	Diary entries maintained on a PowerBook
Coupland, Douglas	The Gum Thief	2007	Journal entries, letters, e-mails, writing exercises, and one work memo
Crumey, Andrew	Mr Mee	2001
Danielewski, Mark Z.	House of Leaves	2000	Fictional manuscript, letters, editorial footnotes, appendices, fictional interviews
de Sade, Marquis	Aline and Valcour	1795	Letters
Patrick Sheane Duncan	Dracula vs. Hitler	2016	Fictional author's note, manuscripts, war dispatches
Dunn, Mark	Ella Minnow Pea	2001
Dunn, Mark	Ibid: A Life	2004
Echenique, Alfredo Bryce	Tarzan's Tonsillitis	2001	First person narrative with letters
El-Mohtar, Amal and Max Gladstone	This Is How You Lose the Time War	2019	Communicated as letters, however the modalities are science fiction and not literal letters.
Elton, Ben	Inconceivable	1999	Diary entries.	Dialogic comedic novel about a couple trying to conceive. They each write their thoughts as a form of therapy to help them in this goal.
Fielding, Helen	Bridget Jones's Diary	1996	Diary entries
Frayn, Michael	The Trick of It	1989
Fuentes, Carlos	La silla del águila (The Eagle's Throne)	2002	Letters and diary entries	Written as a series of letters between high-ranking officials in the Mexican government and persons aspiring to high office. The letters are being written (in 2020) because all telecommunications in Mexico have been disabled by the United States.
Glattauer, Daniel	Gut gegen Nordwind (German)	2006	Email	E-mail correspondence between a man and a woman who fall in love despite never meeting
Hall, Katie and Bogen Jones	The Closeness That Separates Us	2013	E-mails	A dramatic love story across conventional and country borders between Lena and Ed, almost exclusively written as an exchange of e-mails between the two protagonists.
Handler, Daniel	Why We Broke Up	2011	A letter	Illustrated by Maira Kalman
Hanff, Helene	84 Charing Cross Road	1970	Letters	Book, later made into a stage play and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between Hanff and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers located at the eponymous address in London
Ives, David	Voss	2009	Letters
Johnson, Kij	The Fox Woman	1999	Extracts from diaries
Jones, Hunter S	September Ends	2013	Diary entries, emails, chat rooms, an experimental pre-Pinterest board, letters, and poetry
Kaufman, Amie; Kristoff, Jay	Illuminae (Illuminae Files, #1)	2015	Reports, emails, texts, audio transcripts	First in series of three books.
Kaufman, Amie; Kristoff, Jay	Gemina (Illuminae Files, #2)	2016	Reports, emails, texts, audio transcripts
Kaufman, Amie; Kristoff, Jay	Obsidio (Illuminae Files, #3)	2018	Reports, emails, texts, audio transcripts
Kaufman, Bel	Up the Down Staircase	1965	memos, notes dropped in the trash can, student papers, lesson plans, notes from students, and letters to a friend from college	A classic mid-1960s portrayal of an urban high school that is a microcosm of the New York City school system that was also made into a film
Kellaway, Lucy	Who Moved My Blackberry?	2005	Email	Novelisation of the author's Financial Times column featuring Martin Lukes. Most emails are from Lukes himself, so the reader deduces the content of emails he is replying to.
Keyes, Daniel	Flowers for Algernon	1966	Journal	An expanded version of Keyes' 1959 short story of the same name. This book is the journal of mentally disabled janitor, Charlie Gordon, who temporarily becomes a super-genius during a medical experiment. Through changes in grammar and style, Charlie's mental rise and fall are presented.
Kimball, Michael	Dear Everybody	2008	Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles	The unsent letters of Jonathon Bender, detailing his thoughts from 1966 to 1999
King, Stephen	Carrie	1976	Traditional narrative fused with journal articles, interviews, AP ticker reports, and court transcripts
King, Stephen	The Plant	2000	The story is told through various letters, and memos	Unfinished
Kluger, Steve	Last Days of Summer	1998	Letters, postcards, progress reports, and newspaper clippings.	A series of letters during the 1940s between a twelve-year-old and a rookie baseball player
Kluger, Steve	Almost Like Being in Love	2004	The story is told primarily through diary entries, newspaper clippings, office documents, letters, e-mails, menus, Post-It notes and checklists, with only minor reliance on narrative.
Kostova, Elizabeth	The Historian	2005	Letters	Letters, excerpts from books and academic literature, and the narrator's reconstructions of stories told to her by her father.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos	Les Liaisons dangereuses	1782	Letters	A 1782 French novel about the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two narcissistic rivals (and ex-lovers) who use seduction as a weapon to socially control and exploit others, all the while enjoying their cruel games and boasting about their talent for manipulation (also seen as depicting the corruption and depravity of the French nobility shortly before the French Revolution). The book is composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other.
Lardner, Ring	You Know Me Al	1916	Letters	Lardner's first successful book; written by "Jack Keefe", a bush league baseball player, to a friend back home
Lessing, Doris	Shikasta	1979	Letters and reports	Presented as reports on the state of Earth's inhabitants, to a space-faring bureaucratic civilization, authored by one of their own members - Johor, the novel's narrator/protagonist—who incarnates into society to live among humans across several lifetimes in various eras of history. Part 1 of a 5-novel cycle Canopus in Argos: Archives.
Lewis, C. S.	The Screwtape Letters	1942	Letters	Letters from a senior demon to his nephew, a junior tempter, on how to tempt humans into sin, and how to contain the damage when things go wrong (i.e., the target human resists temptation or turns to God).
Lethal, Mac	Texts from Bennett	2013	Text messages	"A family story for the twenty-first century, based on the phenomenally popular Texts from Bennett Tumblr blog, this epistolary novel chronicles the year that Bennett and the rest of his freeloading family moved into his cousin Mac's household" through text messages exchanged between Mac and his cousin Bennett.
Llewellyn, David	Eleven	2006	Email	Emails sent on a single day, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Lucas, Tim	The Book of Renfield	2005	Diary entries, dialogue transcriptions	A book about the character of Renfield from Dracula and thus mimics the format of the novel. Excerpts from Bram Stoker's novel are integrated into the plot
Marsden, John	Letters from the Inside (Young Adult novel)	1991	Letter	The story is told in the form of letters exchanged between 15-year-old girls, Mandy and Tracey, who begin writing after Tracey places an ad in fictional magazine GDY
Martel, Yann	"Manners of Dying" (short story)	1993	Letter	The book is presented as a set of different variants of an official letter that a warden writes to a mother of an executed prisoner named Kevin Barlow. In each letter both the exact details of Kevin's execution and the warden's reaction vary slightly
Mitchell, David	Cloud Atlas	2004	Journal, letter, books (thriller, autobiography), interview transcript, oral history	Nested narrative set across various time periods with each manuscript being 'read' at some point by the next narrator. Made into a film in 2012.
Monteilhet, Hubert	Les Mantes Religieuses (The Praying Mantises)	1960		Made into a BBC television film in 1982
Monteilhet, Hubert	Le Retour des Cendres (Return From the Ashes)	1962		Made into a film starring Maximilian Schell in 1965
Morrison, Rodger	The My Dearest Letters	2003	Historical Letters	The book is presented as a set of love letters from a man, William, to a girl he meets on the street, Anne. Set in Antebellum New England, the book follows their developing love for each other in a very formal society. This work is monological with embedded poetry with both romantic and religious overtones.
Nabokov, Vladimir	Ada	1969
Nieves, Luis López	Voltaire's Heart (Spanish)	2005	E-mail
Nothomb, Amélie	Life Form	2010	Letters	Fictional correspondence between the author and a U.S. soldier, reflects on how writing creates reality.
Oz, Amos	Black Box	1986
Parks, Tim	Home Thoughts	1999
Payne, C. D.	Youth in Revolt	1993	Journal entries
Perlman, Fredy	Letters of Insurgents	1976	Letters	Deals with anarchist themes and relationships
Priest, Christopher	The Prestige	1995	Letters and diary entries
Priest, Christopher	The Islanders	2011	Gazetteer
Randall, Bob	The Fan	1977	Letters and telegrams	Deals with the subject of stalking, but was written years before it became a criminal offense; the title character, Douglas Breen, is shown, in his letters, to be an unreliable narrator and an erotomaniac who turns the blame for things he does onto others
Rieger, Susan	The Divorce Papers	2014	Emails, newspaper articles, court documents, fictional laws, letters, and internal documents from the firm
Rice, Luane and Joseph Monninger	The Letters	2008	Letters
Rushton, Rosie and Nina Schindler	P.S. He's Mine!	2001	E-mail
Saint, H. F.	Memoirs of an Invisible Man	1987	Narrative manuscript	This entire novel is put forth as a letter or manuscript, the first-person narrative of the author/protagonist, written down and left for someone to find, to learn of what has befallen him
Salinger, J. D.	Short stories about the Glass family	1953, 1961, 1963	Letters
Sayers, Dorothy L. and Robert Eustace	The Documents in the Case	1930	Letters and police statements	Some of the letters contradict each other, requiring the reader to decide which characters are more trustworthy
Shklovsky, Viktor	Zoo, or Letters Not About Love	1923	Correspondence with Elsa Triolet
Shriver, Lionel	We Need to Talk About Kevin	2003	Letters	This book consists of letters from Eva, the mother of Kevin, to her husband Franklin
Shteyngart, Gary	Super Sad True Love Story	2010	Diary entries and digital communication records	The book takes alternating narratives through protagonist Lenny Abramov's diary and his love interest's "GlobalTeens" account (an instant messaging technology)
Smith, Lee	Fair and Tender Ladies	1988	Letters
Snicket, Lemony	The Beatrice Letters	2006	Letters and notes	The book is obviously meant to be humorous while at the same time explaining some of the mysteries surrounding the Baudelaires. The letters are between Lemony and Beatrice. Several of the letters (mostly from Lemony Snicket) tend to be very long and rambling; one goes on about his love for Beatrice for four pages. As in The Unauthorized Autobiography pictures and letters allow readers to guess about the author's life.
Steadman, Carl	Two Solitudes	1995	E-mail
Stephenson, Neal and Nicole Galland	The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.	2017	Diaries, emails, internal blog posts, government memos, handwritten notes, translations, Wikipedia entries
Stevermer, Caroline and Patricia Wrede	Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot	1988	Letters	"Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country" (set in a Regency England where magic works)
	The Grand Tour	2004	Diary extracts and testimony	"Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality" (immediate sequel to the work above)
	The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After	2006	Letters	"Being the Private Correspondence Between Two Prominent Families Regarding a Scandal Touching the Highest Levels of Government and the Security of the Realm" (takes place ten years after the previous two books)
Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō	Kagi	1956	Diary entries	Made into the films Odd Obsession (1960) starring Machiko Kyō and Tatsuya Nakadai, and La Chiave in 1983 by Tinto Brass, starring Frank Finlay and Stefania Sandrelli
Townsend, Sue	Adrian Mole series	1982–2009	Diary entries
Wachs, Joseph Alan and Jason Alan Franzen	Treehouse: A Found E-mail Love Affair	2009	E-mail, iPhone app	A series of five iPhone apps by the design firm FORMation that present a set of emails allegedly found when restoring a corrupted hard drive
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple	1983	Letters and diary entries
Webster, Jean	Daddy-Long-Legs	1912	Letters following introductory narrative	An anonymous benefactor sponsors the college education of an orphan girl, Jerusha (Judy) Abbott, with the provision she write him every month
Webster, Jean	Dear Enemy	1915	Letters	Sallie McBride, the college roommate of Judy Abbott of "Daddy-Long-Legs", is appointed superintendent of the John Grier Home, where Judy was brought up. She writes about her doings to Judy, Judy's husband (now the president of the orphanage), and the Scotsman Robin (Sandy) McRae (the "Dear Enemy" of the title) who is the orphanage's doctor.
Wharton, Thomas	Every Blade of Grass	2014	Letters interspersed with narrative and images	A man and woman who live a continent apart write letters to one another about their discoveries of the wonders of nature
Brooks, Max	World War Z	2006	Collection of individual accounts	Narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission after a zombie plague

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