Dating-ish

Marie Harris has had enough of online dating. After one particularly bad evening she starts wondering, half seriously, whether the things she actually wants from a partner could be sourced elsewhere: a professional cuddler, a life coach, someone paid to listen.

Matt Simmons is a computer scientist working on compassionate artificial intelligence, and he is convinced Marie's experiment is evidence for his thesis rather than against it. He is also the childhood friend of one of her knitting group, prickly, difficult, and closer to her life than either of them planned.

Dating-ish is the sixth book in Penny Reid's Knitting in the City series, a contemporary romantic comedy set among a group of friends in Chicago. It is a friends-to-lovers story that spends as much time on loneliness and what people owe each other as it does on the romance.