From Epistolary Fiction to High-Seas Adventure.

I have the great privilege of belonging to a wonderful summer book club and wanted to share four of the best we considered this season:

The Correspondent– Virginia Evans, Crown Publishing Group, 2025.

Theo of Golden– Allen Levi, Atria Books- Simon and Schuster, 2025.

Ransom– Dan Silva, Harper Collins Publishers, 2026.

The Sea Captain’s Wife– Tilar Mazzeo, St. Martin’s Press, 2025.

The Correspondent is the first novel of Virginia Evans, and it is a series of letters describing the life of the major character, Sybil Van Antwerp, who is a 73-year-old retired lawyer.  Critics call this format an epistolary or series of descriptions via letters to share the complex life of this main character.  Already one million copies of the book have been sold, and seven movie studios competed for the film rights.  Ultimately Lionsgate bought that option and has already signed Jane Fonda to portray Sybil on the screen. She will share the bittersweet life of the main character which is filled with charm and tragedy at the same time.

$19.58

Ransom by Dan Silva is his 26^th book which in 414 pages details the continuing episodes of his favorite character, Gabriel Allon, who pretends to be an art restorer while working for the secret police force of Israel known as the Mossad.  Silva has a B. A. from Fresno State College but after many years at both United Press international and CNN television as a public policy specialist, he started to write full- time and pops out a winner each summer which sells at least one million copies.   This year’s thriller tells a complex story of Russian drone warfare, murder, and espionage at the highest levels.  It is a classic for us today in our world of complex geo-politics and international conflicts.

$14.99

Theo of Golden is authored by Allen Levi, a former judge and part-time author who lives in retirement in Georgia and has produced a huge hit with this novel selling already over one million copies.  The extensive tale of an elderly gentleman who buys and gifts 92 portraits from a local artist to the people on each canvas has great emotional depth and spiritual messages for us all.  Levi too has already sold the film rights to Warner Brothers which has chosen Tom Hanks as the actor to portray Theo from the small town of Golden in rural America.  Once I got going on this book, I could not put it down.

$12.99

The women in my local sailing group particularly enjoyed The Sea Captain’s Wife by Tilar Mazzeo which is a true tale of enormous female courage.  Tilar is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and as a cultural historian she dug up the facts of a young woman who steered her husband’s huge freight sailboat through Drake’s Passage at the bottom of South America where gale force winds blew waves over her and her crew for 18 days as they rounded above Antarctica.  Her husband Joshua had become seriously ill on board, and therefore Mary Anne Patton took the helm and drove the boat, called Neptune’s Car, from New York harbor to San Francisco in 1856.  As international shipping and commerce followed the gold rush of 1849 in California, she was indeed a brave lady to weather what most sailors know is the most challenging arena of our worldly seas.

$22.85

In summary, each of these books is a reader’s delight with stories that resonate for us in our complex world of the 21^st century.  Writing is both an art and a science, and for me requires concentration for many days. These four works are indeed a complex group which I hope can be enjoyed by many of our readers.

The post A Book Club’s Picks: Four Works to Consider from Sharon Lorenzo appeared first on Sharp Eye.