Emily has just received one of those amazing letters that Roy was in the habit of sending her when he was on his way back from one of his trips to the ends of the earth. Roy is an explorer both by profession and by his passion for it. His letters are a delicate interweaving of wonderful photographs of faces and landscapes stolen with stealth from the most unspoiled and unexplored places in the natural world and of words written when the emotions are still too strong to be spoken.
Emily was really enthusiastic about these letters every time she received one. She never knew whether to begin reading at once or to give a quick look through the photographs in the hope that she would immediately come across the special picture that Roy never forgot to dedicate to her personally.
Emily too led a lively, busy life only instead of going off to distant, unknown lands, her existence revolved at a frenetic, sometimes dizzy rate within the restricted limits of a city, where according to her there wasn’t a great deal to discover and even less to recount.
This last letter from Roy brings the correspondence between the two of them to a watershed. Tired of banal and clichéd replies Roy asks Emily if just once she could send him a letter that contained the force of amazing, once-in-a-lifetime emotions and unforgettable feelings; a letter that talked of something that you would like to scream from the housetops or more discreetly confide to a special friend.
Her affection for Roy and her wish not to disappoint his expectations force Emily to bring time to a halt as she has never done before and carve out a space for herself filled with poetry, encounters, conversations and special, unique emotions. In a world that she thought she knew only too well she discovers details, nuances and small unexpected moments that make life precious and unforgettable. And, more importantly, they lead her to tell stories that show that there is no need to go to the ends of the earth to experience unusually forceful feelings. It is Emily herself at the end of the novel who states, “…it’s actually in the everyday that one meets the extraordinary”.
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