I think there was a thread about epistolary novels started not so long ago but I can't find it... Can anyone recommend some successful ones? Part of my current novel is in letter-form and I just can't seem to get it right, so I need some inspiration. I think the fact that my letters are being written in the 1950s is getting in the way...just don't feel as if I have a firm grasp, even though I've done quite a bit of research about the particular subject I'm writing about.

Cheers for any recommendations.

Myrtle

Myrtle, is this the one you're thinking about?

http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/65_66715.asp?y=1&spage=1#66783

YES, Dee! Thanks, brilliant.

Myrtle

I read Chris Cleave's Incendiary recently - a book written entirely as one letter from a grieving mother and wife to Osama bin Laden...

That's interesting. Does a novel that's one letter count as epistolary, I wonder?

Emma

Read 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'. It won the Orange last year. I'm two thirds through it and gripped. It's a series of letters a woman writes to her estranged husband, after their son commits a high school massacre. Beautifully written but quite savage in places.

D.

I've heard excellent reports of it too, Rose Tremain's Letter to Sister Benedicta as I remember is also like that.

But I do wonder if it's different when it's more than one person's letters. Possession is a technically brilliant example of how use lots of different writers.

Emma

Emma, you write 'Does a novel that's one letter count as epistolary, I wonder?'

I wouldn't say so. It's a question of structure, innit? You need the contrast of other voices, or implied responses. Anyway, in Incendiary, it's not really a letter, is it? It's a stage set for a monologue (which is fine, of course).

Jim

Jim, yes, I think I'd agree with you. Unless there's more than one letter writer - and arguably they interact - I'm not sure it's epistolary, at least not in a way that makes it different from 1st person PoV.

Emma

The thing with WNTTAK is that the letter is written to the husband, so all the way through the narrator is addressing 'you'. Slightly different from 1st person in its approach, then, and not one that could be approached in any other way than by letter. Yes, the Tremain book is a good example - must reread it.

D.

I read it years ago - as a teenager, I suppose - and got back into her stuff with Music and Silence, which I absolutely adored. Never got beyond the first chapter of Restoration for some reason. Must go back and see the seeds in Sister Benedicta. Her short fiction's terrific too.

Emma

I've almost finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It's a single, extended letter from father to son, so I suppose it doesn't qualify as truly epistolary, but it is truly wonderful...
Tony

One of the split 'novellas' in Cloud Atlas is epistolary and well worth a read.

JB

There was one on Radio 4 in the mornings recently, except it was emails - Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge -perhaps that's not her name, but she was Hermione Bucket in the sitcom. It was very funny.e I think pistolary novels or episodes are a good device because you can have completely different voices writing about the same event, which makes for dramatic interest. They were popular in the eighteenth century. I think it was Richardson's 'Pamela' where this young girl writes to a cousin about how a rake is trying to seduce her and then we get the letters from the rake to one of his friends detailing his progress.

Good luck with your book.

Sheila

Emma - have you read 'The Way I Found Her'? I think this is Tremain's best, closely followed by 'Music and Silence', and 'The Colour', which is just beautifully written.