Virtual love

The quest for love - however erotic, bizarre or even violent its outcome - is at the heart of Avodah Offit's startling novel. Both a psychological cliff-hanger and a love story, Virtual Love explores the variety of sexual impulse with daring, intelligence, and stunning insight. Corresponding across the continent by E-mail, Aphra and Marc, two psychiatrists, agree to the roles of teacher and student so that he may learn sex therapy from her.

Marc, at war with a childhood distorted by an enigmatic and almost invisible father, unable to cope with his own failed marriage, is threatened by a dangerous and obsessive passion for a doomed and beautiful patient.... Aphra, inquisitive, unflappable, the haunted chronicler of her patients' sagas, is menaced by the demons of her childhood: her omnipotent mother and her remote father, who themselves play out a complicated drama of betrayal and revenge.

When Marc writes to Aphra, with feelings that men rarely communicate to women, they fall - almost wordlessly - in love, only to discover in a breathtaking and unexpected climax that they have more in common than they bargained for. The theme of Virtual Love is both sexual betrayal and betrayal by sex, although a vision of love offers hope of redemption for each disloyalty and each surrender.

Wise, passionate, compassionate, astonishingly original, and, ultimately, forgiving, Virtual Love is a love story for the nineties, a Liaisons Dangereuses for the electronic age, at once shocking and, in the most subtly complex sense of the word, romantic.