a novel in letters
Alan Spark
A widow starts answering her dead husband’s secret correspondent — and falls for the one stranger who might know he was murdered.
The letter that starts everything
Eleven months after Thanh buried her husband, a letter arrives addressed to him — from a man who doesn’t know he’s dead. This is that letter. Read it, and you’ll understand why she wrote back.
Dear David,
It has been a long while since your last letter, and I have decided not to hold it against you. A man is allowed to go quiet.
I am writing because the weather turned tonight, and a wet road at night always brings you to mind — and the promise you made me about the one you said you would never drive again after dark.
There is a thing I have been meaning to tell you for six years. I have started this letter a hundred times and burned ninety-nine. I am not going to burn this one.
Tell me the girl in the photograph still does that thing with her hands when she is angry. Tell me you forgive me for the part you do not know about yet.
— Cor
Thanh Mercer buried her husband eleven months ago. The police called it an accident — a car, a wet road, a bad night.
Then a letter arrives for David from a man named Cor, who clearly doesn’t know David is dead — a man David had been writing to, privately, for six years, and never once mentioned. Thanh means only to write back and say he’s gone. Instead she writes back as David.
Cor tells “David” things that don’t match the accident report. A road David had no reason to be on. A phone call the night he died. A debt Thanh never knew existed. By the time she confesses who she really is, she has already fallen for the last person who spoke to her husband alive — and maybe the reason he’s dead.
Told entirely in letters, emails, and the odd stolen document: the intimacy of a letter-novel with the pulse of a thriller. For readers who loved the quiet of The Correspondent and wished something was actually at stake.
The first fifty readers get the author’s note, the deleted “burned letter,” and their name kept in the launch list. This counter runs on your device — it’s an honest early-reader count, not fake scarcity.
Bonus — the ninety-ninth burned letter
Cor wrote this the night before the one that reached her. He burned it. Here it is anyway.
David —
I keep trying to say it plainly and the pen will not do it. So tonight I am not going to say it at all. I am only going to tell you that the rain is the same rain, and that I have kept everything, and that when I am gone there should be one person left who knows what we were, and I think it has to be her, the folding hands, whether you ever tell her or not.
Burn this. You always were better at the careful part.
— C.
Alan Spark is a pen name. The same hands run three doors that may help your life — whether or not you ever buy another book.
If the book moves you and you’d like to send something forward — never owed, only paid onward:
PayPal @CuongFBI • Venmo @Cuong-Pham-96 • Zelle Cuong Pham (714) 612-9546
A blessing on the reader:
May your true letters always find their address, may the false ones always find their way back, and may there be someone on your shore who has learned to read your hands.
What you send into the world is what waits, one day, in your box. Send well.