7 Unconventional Love Stories to Set Your Heart Pitter-Pattering

Do you have a "must-have" list for your potential partners? Meet Don Tillman — whose list is sure to put yours to shame. He’s an oddly charming yet socially challenged genetics professor who has set out on The Wife Project. When he meets Rosie Jarman, everything he thought he wanted goes out the window.

In the very near future, in a world where the global economy is collapsing and romantic prospects are judged with the click of a button and everyone is obsessed with being young forever (sound familiar?), Lenny Abramov still has the audacity to look for love.

Having someone to love when I’m eighty is one of my #lifegoals and that’s why I’m crazy about this novel. Eighty-two-year-old Etta’s greatest unfulfilled wish is to see the sea, and she sets out to walk the two thousand miles from her home to the water. Left only with their memories and their own love for her, her husband, Otto, and neighbor, Russell, wait patiently until she returns.

Sometimes love arrives in the form of a slap in the face that’s just what we needed to get back to reality. When Cheryl, a tightly wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone with a perpetual lump in her throat, meets 21-year-old Clee, her eccentrically ordered world explodes — and she unexpectedly finds the love of a lifetime.

When two people at their weakest moments meet, the odds of their love persevering are unlikely. But when Lou, who’s just lost her job and is on the rocks with her boyfriend, meets Will, whose recent motorcycle accident has taken away his desire to live, they find the strongest people they’ve ever known — or loved.

Attention, suitors — I am such a sucker for a Spotify or YouTube playlist. If you are, too, you’ll love the memoir Love Is a Mix Tape. Rob Sheffield brings readers back to the days of tape decks and Nirvana by talking us through the loves and losses he memorialized on fifteen of his favorite mix tapes.

This love story is for those who want to get out of the "friend zone." This is a deeply original and unconventional novel about a friends-then-lovers affair that happens between two ranch hands one Summer on the range. The bonus with this is that you can watch the movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger afterward. It’s worth it.

Here are more great book recommendations from our friends at Off the Shelf:

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• The Quiet Book That Ended My Reading Rut