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