Epistolary Fiction
Top 10 Epistolary Fiction
: Bridget Jones's Diary, Griffin and Sabine, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, I Capture the Castle, The Handmaid's Tale, Daddy-Long-Legs, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot
Meet Bridget Jones—a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if she could:
a. lose 7 pounds
b. stop smoking
c. develop Inner Poise
"123 lbs. (how is it possible to put on 4 pounds in the middle of the night? Could flesh have somehow solidified becoming denser...
| Author | Nick Bantock |
| ISBN | 1551924013 |
It all started with a mysterious and seemingly innocent postcard, but from that point nothing was to remain the same in the life of Griffin Moss, a quiet, solitary artist living in London. His logical, methodical world was suddenly turned upside down by a strangely exotic woman living on a tropical island...
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
| Author | Mark Dunn |
| ISBN | 0385722435 |
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens...
| Author | Pierre Choderlos de Laclos |
| ISBN | 0192838679 |
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil,...
| Author | Maria Semple |
| ISBN | 0316204277 |
Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox...
| Author | Dodie Smith |
| ISBN | 0312181108 |
Through six turbulent months of 1934, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps a journal, filling three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries about her home, a ruined Suffolk castle, and her eccentric and penniless family. By the time the last diary shuts, there have been great changes in...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
When Jerusha Abbott, an eighteen-year-old girl living in an orphan asylum, was told that a mysterious millionaire had agreed to pay for her education, it was like a dream come true. For the first time in her life, she had someone she could pretend was "family." But everything was not perfect, for he chose...
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
| Author | Helen Fielding |
| ISBN | 0140298479 |
Lurching from the cappuccino bars of Notting Hill to the blissed-out shores of Thailand, Bridget Jones searches for The Truth in spite of pathetically unevolved men, insane dating theories, and Smug Married advice ("'I'm just calling to say in the potty! In the potty! Well, do it in Daddy's hand, then!'")....
A great deal is happening in London and the country this season.
For starters, there's the witch who tried to poison Kate at the Royal College of Wizards. There's also the man who seems to be spying on Cecelia. (Though he's not doing a very good job of it--so just what are his intentions?) And then...
| Author | Jane Austen |
| ISBN | 0486444074 |
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
O Lady Susan Vernon, what a juicy jewel of a villainous character you are, a black diamond, repelling and fascinating at the same time, your wicked charm inspiring possibly an uncanny form of envy more than simple revulsion. Deceiving everyone...
Daddy-Long-Legs & Dear Enemy
| Author | Jean Webster |
| ISBN | 0143039067 |
One of the great novels of American girlhood, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long- Legs (1912) follows the adventures of an orphan named Judy Abbott, whose letters to her anonymous male benefactor trace her development as an independent thinker and writer. Its sequel, Dear Enemy (1915), also told in letters,...
| Author | Meg Cabot |
| ISBN | 0613371658 |
The first book in the #1
New York Times
bestselling Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot.
Mia Thermopolis is pretty sure there’s nothing worse than being a five-foot-nine, flat-chested freshman, who also happens to be flunking Algebra. Is she ever in for a surprise.
First Mom...
| Author | Nick Bantock |
| ISBN | 0811801802 |
Griffin
Foolish man. You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened. You do not dismiss a muse at a whim. If you will not join me--then I will come to you.
Sabine
Sabine was supposed to be imaginary, a friend and lover that Griffin had created to soothe his loneliness....
| Author | Meg Cabot |
| ISBN | 0060845546 |
Well it is almost 1 o'clock and I just finished this book. I couldn't put it down. I really enjoyed it! I gave it 5 stars, the definition for 5 stars is "it was amazing" and I probably wouldn't say that because I don't think you can say that chic lit is "amazing". If I had to give it a score out of 10 I would give it...
| Author | Meg Cabot |
| ISBN | 0330418874 |
Meet Kate Mackenzie. She:
- works for the T.O.D. (short for Tyrannical Office Despot, also known as Amy Jenkins, Director of the Human Resources Division at the New York Journal)
- is sleeping on the couch because her boyfriend of ten years refuses to commit
- can't find an affordable...
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0679735909 |
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from...
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily...
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
| Author | Samuel Richardson |
| ISBN | 0192829602 |
One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists,"...
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
| Author | Max Brooks |
| ISBN | 0307346609 |
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that...
| Author | Jessica Brockmole |
| ISBN | 0345542606 |
A sweeping story told in letters, spanning two continents and two world wars, Jessica Brockmole’s atmospheric debut novel captures the indelible ways that people fall in love, and celebrates the power of the written word to stir the heart.
March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth...
| Author | Jaclyn Moriarty |
| ISBN | 0312287364 |
A funny, touching, revealing story written entirely in the form of letters, messages, postcards - and bizarre missives. Hilariously candid, shows that the roller coaster ride of being a teenager is every bit as fun as we remember--and every bit as harrowing.
Life is pretty complicated for...
| Author | Shannon Hale |
| ISBN | 1599900513 |
When Dashti, a maid, and Lady Saren, her mistress, are shut in a tower for seven years because of Saren's refusal to marry a man she despises, the two prepare for a very long and dark imprisonment.
As food runs low and the days go from broiling hot to freezing cold, it is all Dashti can do to keep them...
The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie
| Author | Jaclyn Moriarty |
| ISBN | 0439740517 |
Bindy Mackenzie believes herself to be the smartest, kindest girl at Ashbury High. Unfortunately, she is alone in that belief.
To prove her likeability, Bindy decides to document her life in transcripts, essays, and e-mails. What this reveals is a girl who's funny, passionate, hilariously...
| Author | Samuel Richardson |
| ISBN | 0140432159 |
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage...
| Author | Julie Schumacher |
| ISBN | 0385538138 |
Finally, a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary."
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters,...
A Brief History of Montmaray
| Author | Michelle Cooper |
| ISBN | 0375858644 |
Sophie FitzOsborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray with her eccentric and impoverished royal family. When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in...
In the Time of the Butterflies
| Author | Julia Alvarez |
| ISBN | 0452274427 |
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.
From the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost...
| Author | Steve Kluger |
| ISBN | 0060821442 |
A contemporary American classic—a poignant and hilarious tale of baseball, hero worship, eccentric behavior, and unlikely friendship
Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s....
The Father Christmas Letters
| Author | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| ISBN | 0048231304 |
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this collection of letters that "Father Christmas" wrote to the Tolkien children from the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. What I discovered surprised me, and yet I couldn't help but nod my head and chuckle and think, "of course, of course!" When the...
Everything Is Illuminated
| Author | Jonathan Safran Foer |
| ISBN | 0060529709 |
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable...
| Author | Karen Cushman |
| ISBN | 0060739428 |
"Corpus Bones! I utterly loathe my life."Catherine feels trapped. Her father is determined to marry her off to a rich man--any rich man, no matter how awful. But by wit, trickery, and luck, Catherine manages to send several would-be husbands packing. Then a shaggy-bearded suitor from the north comes...
| Author | Susan Beth Pfeffer |
| ISBN | 0152061548 |
Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda,...
| Author | M.T. Anderson |
| ISBN | 0763624020 |
It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother -- a princess in exile from a faraway land -- are the only persons in their household assigned names....
| Author | Susan Rieger |
| ISBN | 0804137447 |
Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away,...
| Author | Bel Kaufman |
| ISBN | 0060973617 |
Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase is one of the best-loved novels of our time. It has been translated into sixteen languages, made into a prize-winning motion picture, and staged as a play at high schools all over the United States; its very title has become part of the American idiom.
Never...
| Author | Steven Brust |
| ISBN | 0812562615 |
It is 1849. Across Europe, the high tide of revolution has crested, leaving recrimination and betrayal in its wake. From the high councils of Prussia to the corridors of Parliament, the powers-that-be breathe sighs of relief. But the powers-that-be are hardly unified among themselves. Far from it...
On...
| Author | Montesquieu |
| ISBN | 0140442812 |
This richly evocative novel-in-letters tells the story of two Persian noblemen who have left their country - the modern Iran - to journey to Europe in search of wisdom. As they travel, they write home to wives and eunuchs in the harem and to friends in France and elsewhere. Their colourful observations...
| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| ISBN | 1558611584 |
‘It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . .’
Based on the author’s own experiences, 'The Yellow Wallpaper'...
| Author | Beverly Cleary |
| ISBN | 0380709589 |
Leigh has been Boyd Henshaw's number one fan ever since he was in second grade. Now in sixth grade, Leigh lives with his mother and is the new kid in school. He's lonely, troubled by the absence of his father, a cross-country trucker, and angry because a mysterious thief steals from his lunchbag. Then Leigh's...
