This is a book of emails and nothing else, so some of these have to be a bit longer to provide background to the story and the characters, but this comes across naturally and not forced in the way some emails, or indeed diary entries, in other books can. In a lot of ways it’s like reading a play as everything else is stripped away, leaving behind nothing but pure dialogue. Instead, each paragraph is preceded by a ‘one minute later’ or ‘the next morning’ giving you immediate understanding of the passage of time, but no on-going reminders – it’s hard to keep track of how long those minutes and days add up to as pages pass, since each new email is referenced only in relation to the one that came before. We aren’t told who is sending each one (but though it’s not a direct back and forth, you can usually still tell who is writing from what and how things are said) and we’re also not given a date or time.

For one thing, the messages include only a subject line, and the text itself. There are lots of books that use email to tell the story, either partly or in its entirety (the classic E: A Novel springs to mind), but this one is a bit different. We don’t know where the book is set other than it’s a German-speaking city, but that is immaterial anyway as the story takes place entirely online. What starts as an insignificant, casual message quickly becomes something much more important to both her and Leo as two people who have never met start to share their secrets and wishes, dreams and fears with each other, not just because they can but, it seems, because they have to. When Emmi sends and email to cancel a magazine subscription, she has no idea what a slight typo in the email address will lead to – a life-changing, potentially marriage-wrecking, all-consuming online love affair with the man whom she emails in error. Suprising, sweet and thoroughly captivating.

Summary: Told entirely through the medium of emails, this is an addictive book that's much better than it needed to be.

Love Virtually by Daniel Glattauer