A highly educated "renaissance man" from America develops aphasia after being in an accident in Australia. The aphasia results in verbal paraphasia (essentially, he remembers his entire vocabulary but the words and their meanings are all scrambled. There's an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that illustrates this well).
Because of his condition, he has to spend all of his time living with a therapist: the young and pretty Srilankan/Aussie doctor who studies language theory and aphasia named Amanda. The man had no identification on him when the accident occurred, so he is a "John Doe". He still remembers words to songs and how to play music and re-learns how to do math which allows him to somewhat express his thoughts. Eventually, he falls in love with Amanda and eventually kisses her, at which point he begins to be able to re-learn how to form basic sentences.
The novel would explore the nature of love, language, epistemology, music theory, and how communication works.
