by Lisa Asanuma

Created on: April 18, 2008

The epistolary novel takes its name from the word epistle, which one might remember from Bible Study is a word for a letter, and traditionally these novels are told in the form of letters, and there are a few possibilities here. Either it is a correspondence between two speakers, between one specific speaker and multiple others, or between a group of people, who are interconnected in some way.

Recently, however, the definition has widened to include novels that are in the form of a journal, or other written mediums as well. Some experimental books, such as Australian auther Jaclyn Moriarty's novels, include almost anything that her characters have or could find written down, including everything from court transcripts to school bulletins, to even post-it notes, mixing these things with the more traditional formats of letters and diary entries.

Now that we have entered the digital age, there are even entire books told through emails and instant messages, the most popular of course being Lauren Myracle's TTFN series. While these books are rare, and are generally constricted to the young adult section of the bookstore at present, times are changing. Cecelia Ahern (author of the recently film-adapted P.S. I Love You)'s second novel, Love, Rosie (AKA Rosie Dunn), pointed towards older audiences, is told about halfway in letters and emails, half in instant messages, and the trend seems to be gaining speed in the general fiction world.

It's not difficult to understand the growing popularity, either. Reading an epistolary novel is like gaining an inside peak into someone else's life, giving the reader a bit of a voyeuristic pleasure. It is slightly more intimate than a traditionally told, third-person point of view story, and has a different tilt to it than a first-person perspective. It's possible also that the popularity of books told in the form of letters conveys a secret, suppressed sorrow that many people in society have over the lost art of letter-writing in general. As so often happens, what we cannot find in real life, we then look for in fiction.

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