Katie Couric's New Book Club Crowned A 2025 Smash Hit As Its First Pick

Joining the ranks of Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager, Katie Couric has launched her very own celebrity book club, and she just announced her first pick. "The January selection is Virginia Evans' novel 'The Correspondent,' a book that was given to me for Christmas by my good friend Carmela Ciuraru," Couric shared on her website. Published in April 2025, Evans' book has amassed many fans, with over 174,000 reviewers giving it 4.5 stars on Goodreads to date. The January 2026 celebrity book club pick, written in epistolary form, follows the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old woman who corresponds with friends and family through letters. Through Van Antwerp's eyes and the letters written back to her, readers piece together the life she has made for herself, past regrets, and loss.

"This was uplifting and at times heavy but beautifully written. A tribute to a life past, but also a life which can be filled in abundance with surprises right up to the end of a winter season," a reviewer wrote on Goodreads. Another stated, "This novel is packed with emotion. It hit my heart. It is a heavy, thought-provoking read. As you read these letters, your heart will break, but it will also heal and be hopeful. Grief is a main theme that I connected strongly with. The writing was fantastic." With all the rave reviews, it's hard to believe that "The Correspondent" took some time to take off, and unlike Witherspoon's favorite book of 2025, "Broken Country," Evans' novel gained traction more quietly.

"The Correspondent" is a huge hit with readers, and while the book has done well in stores, Virginia Evans revealed that it wasn't until several months after its launch that success picked up. "I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people, and everybody I talked to on the road in bookstores ... were starting to say, 'This is becoming a thing, we can't keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock.' And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it's getting bigger," she shared with The New York Times.

Adding to the significance of "The Correspondent"'s success is the fact that Evans almost gave up on writing entirely. "I wrote 'The Correspondent' when my last novel wasn't selling, and in fact I was probably coming to some terms with the possibility that nothing I wrote would ever sell," the author admitted in an Instagram post. Evans told fans that writing as Sybil Van Antwerp was a personal exercise and had no intention of sharing her work with the public, but something clicked. "I can't say exactly why it worked this time around, but I imagine it has something to do with that abandon with which I wrote precisely the book I myself wanted to read, without the consciousness of an audience," she continued. Thankfully, Evans didn't give up, and "The Correspondent" remains one of the best fiction books of 2025, and with Katie Couric's endorsement, we're sure it'll be a hit this year as well.