New Books Network Interview: April Howells

It’s hard to remember these days—assuming one ever knew it in the first place—what an important role the US Post Office once played in keeping alive the connections joining friends, families, neighbors, even businesses and their customers. As April Howells notes in my latest New Books Network interview, what we now do through cellphones and texting was once the domain of stamped letters and party lines.

So when a massive overflow of unsolicited mail overwhelmed the Chicago Post Office in 1966, the delivery of letters as far away as the Dakotas and certain Canadian provinces shut down. Read on, and listen to our conversation to find out more, as seen through the eyes of an octogenarian suffering from the early stages of dementia, a neurodivergent teen, and those attempting to keep them both safe and well.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

In the midst of texting and cell phones, online websites and GPS, it can be difficult to remember an era when almost all communication took place by landline or snail mail, as it’s now called, and driving depended on the ability to read a printed map. But April Howells’s debut novel vividly recaptures that world.

The Unforgettable Mailman (Alcove Press, 2026) opens in Chicago in October 1966. The post office, overwhelmed with unsolicited mail in the days before the ZIP code, has shut down temporarily, and an elderly resident named Henry Walton decides that someone must deliver the mail. People depend on letters, after all, and without them, connections with their nearest and dearest will fade.

Henry himself suffers from a bad leg leftover from World War I and an increasingly dicey memory. But despite these obstacles, he succeeds in breaking into the post office and leaving with approximately 300 letters, destined for places as far apart as Canada and the Dakotas. Throughout the story we see Henry’s interactions with the recipients of the letters as well as the letters themselves, and through the exchanges Henry’s own past becomes ever clearer. After a while, his journey intersects with that of Roger, a high-school student in search of the father who left home, and the two of them pursue the delivery of the letters as we learn more about what makes each of them tick.

This haunting novel, which came out a couple of months ago, captivated me from the very beginning. Henry is beautifully portrayed and sympathetic, and so are all the people with whom he interacts along the road—including, of course, Roger.