Don is a professor of genetics at a well known university in Melbourne. Unlike Sheldon, Don has no Leonard, Wolowitz, Raj, Penny et. al. to help him navigate life. His only surviving friends are fellow professor Gene and his wife Claudia. We’re never told (or fathom from the book) why the couple take Don under their wing and feel compelled to help him but it’s a needed construct to make the story work. With no Wolowitz or Koothrapalli to fill out a survey on a matchmaking site, he resorts to the most obviously logical technique he can muster to find a suitable mate: a questionnaire. Designed to weed out the indisciplined, alcoholics, unhealthy, mathematically challenged and so on. The Wife Project.

Enter Roise, who quite predictably is as far from the ideal as determined by Don’s questionnaire, as you can imagine. Yet, he is inexplicably drawn to help her in her quest to find her biological father: The Father Project. The rest of the book is Don’s quest to fathom his own needs and desires, his attempts to fit in to his seemingly alien world and find romance.