Bill The Biologist

Dr. William J. Morrison is a molecular biologist who understands exactly how love works. He can name the hormones, map the receptors, and calculate the half-life of a crush. What he cannot do is feel any of it, or explain it to another human being without emptying the room.

When his mentor dies, Bill delivers a eulogy about decomposition. When his best friend gets married, Bill toasts the happy couple by comparing them to prairie voles. He once tried to end a relationship with a twelve-page handout, complete with citations. He means well. He always means well. But somewhere between the textbook and the heart, something gets lost in translation.

Then Bill falls in love. Twice. And discovers that the one system he never learned to operate is his own.

Bill the Biologist is a comic novel told from the inside out. Every chapter is narrated by a different part of Bill, and none of them are impressed with him. His amygdala panics. His gut bacteria stage a small rebellion. His prefrontal cortex files complaints. His tear ducts, dormant since he was eleven years old, wait for a signal that never comes. Together they watch their host stumble through dating apps, breakups, a therapist who has truly earned her fee, and one wedding speech that two hundred guests will never recover from.

Underneath the comedy is a quieter story. Maya wants Bill to change. Sophie loves him exactly as he is. And Bill, who has spent his entire life converting pain into data, slowly runs into the one thing the data cannot hold. This is a book about a man who knows the name of every feeling and the sensation of almost none of them, and what it costs him to finally feel one.

It is biology as you have never been taught it: accurate to the last receptor, narrated by the body itself, and far more tender than it lets on. The science is real. The mechanisms are correct. The heartbreak is, unfortunately, also correct.

For readers who love their love stories smart, their comedy a little clinical, and their heartbreak delivered by an unreliable narrator who happens to be a cluster of neurons. For anyone who has ever understood something perfectly and felt it not at all. And for every person who became a scientist because the living world was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, and then wondered why that love was so hard to say out loud.

The world's first biological love story. Funnier than it has any right to be, and quietly devastating when you least expect it.