The first time I picked up Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mixtape, I was alone in a chain bookstore in New York City. My friend's train was coming in late; I'd checked out of my hotel already, and my backpack was weighing me down. Wandering through the shelves in the music section, the title caught my eye.

'Mixtapes,' I thought. I found a nook to settle in and set down my backpack. 'Mixtapes are good.'

Forty pages later, I was hooked. I got up to buy a coffee, and read about half the book before I paid for it and moved to Penn Station to finish it. Within a couple hours of finding the book, I'd read it, cover to cover.

Full of moving stories of love and lost love, joy and grief, and learning to cope with everything, Love is a Mixtape reads like... well, a mixtape. Detailing the relationship of the author and his wife, the novel starts with a playlist called Rumblefish. It's full of nineties alternative bands, and the reader soon realizes it's not the songs that matter; it's the author’s attachment to them.

He writes of meeting a woman named Renee, and how the two of them became inseparable. He writes of living together, her homemade clothes, and how absolutely head-over-heels in love with her he was. He writes of her death.

It’s very easy to get drawn into Sheffield's style, and equally easy to relate to it. Every page reads like getting hit by a brick. The prose perfectly illustrates Sheffield’s feelings at every exact moment. If you happened to see someone with a backpack on the floor in Penn Station around February, reading a book…well, I wish you’d stopped to ask what book I was reading.

I don't think there are words enough to describe how amazing this book is. The nostalgia of cassettes would normally be enough on its own to draw people in to read a book like this. But Rob Sheffield's previous experience as a Rolling Stone columnist gives him the ability to pack a punch within a very short space, leading a reader from one word to the next with more ease than the transitions between tracks on a mixtape.

The next time you're in the bookstore or the library, pick up Love is a Mixtape. Read it; love it; I can guarantee you will.

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