The Rosie Project

Graeme Simsion’s novel The Rosie Project introduces Don Tillman, a brilliant but socially literal genetics professor in Melbourne who suspects he is wired differently from most people. Having never managed a second date, Don launches the Wife Project: a ruthlessly logical questionnaire designed to filter out smokers, drinkers, vegetarians, and the chronically late, all in pursuit of an optimal partner. His orderly plan derails when his friend Gene sends Rosie Jarman, a sharp-tongued bartender, into his office. Rosie fails the questionnaire instantly, yet Don agrees to help her identify her biological father using genetic testing, a search he calls the Father Project while concealing it behind a cover story about a survey. The comedy and the novel’s framework grow from the collision between Don’s rigid schedules and Rosie’s improvisational life. Simsion structures much of the story around Don’s lists, his Standardized Meal System with its weekly menu rotations, and an itinerary-driven trip to New York where he lectures on Asperger’s syndrome. Meanwhile, the Father Project narrows the candidate pool through DNA samples collected at a faculty dinner and other schemes, while Don’s unexamined assumptions about compatibility slowly loosen. The book is told entirely in Don’s precise, deadpan first-person voice, so readers see his reasoning from the inside even when his conclusions are plainly wrong. Published in 2013, the novel became an international bestseller and spawned two sequels, The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Result. What grounds it is not the premise’s quirkiness but Don’s earnest attempts to decode other people, and Rosie’s refusal to be reduced to a checklist.