Dear reader

Epistolary novels – sometimes called letter fiction – are told through the vehicle of letters written by one or more of the characters. One of the earliest forms of the English novel, this has the effect of verisimilitude, having apparently no intermediary between the character and the reader, obscuring the author and their interference in the narrative, while also giving a sense of dramatic immediacy. In its reliance on subjective points of view, it is the forerunner of the modern psychological novel, offering an intimate view of a character’s thoughts and feelings.

· First published in 1938, Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressman Taylor is an intermittent correspondence between two friends over 16 months between 1932 and 1934; though both German, one is in Munich and one is a Jew living in San Francisco and the degradation of their relationship charts the unfolding horrors of Nazi Germany.

· Celie – young, poor, uneducated and horribly mistreated – writes letters to God in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, and remains both controversial and influential.

· Gilbert Markham writes a series of letters to his friend about the mysterious young widow who is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the novel by Anne Brontë.

· First a book, then a play, a television production and a film, 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff contains a twenty-year correspondence between the author and an antiquarian bookseller.

· Comprising a dossier of hacked correspondence and documents, the YA novel Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff tells the story of the evacuation of the planet, circa 2575, coinciding with a painful relationship break-up.

· Written by C S Lewis and dedicated to J R R Tolkien, The Screwtape Letters are concerned with theological matters of temptation and the resistance to it, written by the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter in need of mentoring.

· Eva writes to her absent husband recounting the trials of maternity and their cost to her marriage in Lionel Shriver’s disturbing novel about a high school shooting, We Need to Talk About Kevin.

· Letters, as well as emails, interviews and diary entries, are the vehicle for the slightly surreal story of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday, in which a British expert is commissioned to establish a salmon population in a river which is dry for most of the year.

· The self-portrait painted in the letters of Lady Susan is an expression of female frustration in a society that has no use for her talents, in the short novel by Jane Austen.

· Credited as the original epistolary novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson was published in 1740 and is a story about a servant girl resisting the improper attentions of her employer. It was famously satirised the following year as Shamela, by Henry Feilding, the parody also in epistolary form.