The best novels that feature unlikely friendships or unexpected pairings

I am fascinated with “made families,” those connections of strangers who pass into such intimate friendships that they become de facto, chosen families.

While the core premise of The Housekeeper and the Professor will seize your imagination—the “professor” has suffered a traumatic brain injury that leaves him with only 8 minutes of short-term memory—it is the beauty of the friendship that emerges between him, the “housekeeper” hired to care for him, and her ten-year-old son that will stay with you.

In the present-tense living of having to reintroduce themselves anew to this math genius every morning, all the characters learn the value of a moment, and together they experience the “curious equations that can create a family.”

This thin, lovely, uplifting novel helped me re-learn the potency of fleeting moments and the enduring lessons of unexpected love.

I am a sucker for stories of redemption, especially those that show even the most entrenched people are capable of change.

Make the agent of change a child, and you’ve got me for sure. Place the story in the hands of a lyrical writer and then locate it in the hard-loved, haunting beauty of my native state—Wyoming—and it’s a hopeless match.

An Unfinished Life tells of the escape from an abusive boyfriend by Jean Gilkyson and her ten-year-old daughter Griff. With nowhere left to go, they take refuge with Jean's estranged father-in-law, Einar, a more-than-reluctant host who blames Jean for the death of his son.

Griff is the transformative agent, falling in love with Einar’s sprawling ranch and quiet way of life, and eventually, with the grandfather she didn’t know she had.

Told in spare, clean, beautiful prose, Plainsong picks up on similar themes to An Unfinished Life, with Haruf exploring the unlikely and supportive relationships that emerge for several members of a small Colorado town.

Most reminiscent are the McPheron brothers, elderly rancher bachelors who take in Victoria, a pregnant teenage girl. Then there is Tom Guthrie, whose depressed wife leaves him alone to raise their two boys. Told in chapters that focus on these different characters, their lives become entwined and they find paths through crisis with the help of practical strangers.

I fell in love with this book and these characters long before I had the random and amazing chance to have Kent Haruf voluntarily come and spend an hour with young fiction writers, the man as kind and nurturing as his characters.

French defines what I want out of crime fiction, for while she is a master of plot and suspense, it is the depth of her characters, their backstories, and often the edgy, unpredictable nature of detectives forced together in the demanding, tense nature of a “murder squad” that takes her to a place few other crime writers reach. That and impeccable prose.

The Secret Place develops much of its tension in the pairing of a young detective eager to prove his worth and his hardened senior partner, the masterfully depicted Antoinette Conway, a biracial woman who has fought so hard to be taken seriously that she has little tolerance for her partner.

A begrudging respect grows over the course of the novel, and the intricacy of their partnership is as intriguing as the crime they must solve. 

I love this book so much I would be tempted to include it on any list, no matter the theme.

Luckily, I don’t have to stretch this theme to recommend this masterful novel. Indeed, one part of many compelling elements that drive this novel forward is the reader’s lingering question regarding what feels inevitable: “When will these two lives converge?”

It is the story of a blind French girl and an orphaned Nazi conscript on opposite sides of the German occupation of France. As intricate in its plot as it is in its stunning imagery, this is a rare novel, one that made me feel I understood these two characters better than most of the people in my life, and I found myself desperate to see them emerge from this war free and whole.