Full of heart and humour, The Rosie Project is the winner of the Australian Book Industry Award for Best Book 2014.
Featuring the oddly charming, socially challenged genetics professor, Don, as he seeks true love… The art of love is never a science: Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially inept professor of genetics, who's decided it's time he found a wife.
In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Rosie Jarman possesses all these qualities. Don easily disqualifies her as a candidate for The Wife Project (even if she is “quite intelligent for a barmaid”). But Don is intrigued by Rosie's own quest to identify her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on The Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie―and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don't find love, it finds you.
Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion's distinctive debut “navigates the choppy waters of adult relationships, both romantic and platonic, with a fresh take ("USA TODAY”).
Reviews
" Funny, touching, and hard to put down, The Rosie Project is certain to entertain even as readers delve into deep themes. For a book about a logic-based quest for love, it has a lot of heart." Booklist
‘Funny and heartwarming, a gem of a book.’ Marian Keyes
‘It’s an extraordinarily clever, funny, and moving book about being comfortable with who you are and what you’re good at. I’m sending copies to several friends and hope to re-read it later this year. This is one of the most profound novels I’ve read in a long time.’ Bill Gates
‘One of the quirkiest, most adorable novels I've come across…Don Tillman is such a fantastic, lovable, geeky character that you're cheering for him from page one…Thoughtful and fun, very different and utterly charming.’ NZ Herald on Sunday
‘An endearing, funny book, a quirky love story, and a must read for 2013.’ Daily Telegraph, UK
‘Don Tillman helps us believe in possibility, makes us proud to be human beings, and the bonus is this: he keeps us laughing like hell. I'd love to have a beer with the humane and hilarious Graeme Simsion.’ Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author
‘…the overall effect of The Rosie Project will be, if anything, to increase genuine understanding of Aspergers (or, as it will soon be called, the autistic spectrum) and to refute some common myths. It's great fun, too.’ Jo Case, Australian Book Review
‘As you start reading this extraordinary work, there's no doubt that unlikely hero Don Tillman is about to take the world if not by storm, then certainly by rational argument… Laugh-out loud funny, poignant and so ingenious and compelling you feel as if you want to jump into the world of the novel and join in.’ Australian Women's Weekly
Author Biography
Graeme Simsion worked as a computer operator, programmer and database specialist before founding a consulting business in 1982. By the time he sold Simsion Bowles & Associates in 1999, it had grown to some seventy staff in three cities. Graeme had built an international reputation in data management and written the standard text on data modelling. Until the success of The Rosie Project enabled him to concentrate on his writing, he continued to deliver seminars around the world. Graeme is a founder of Pinot Now, a wine importer and distributor and Roy's Antiques in Melbourne. He recently resigned from his position as a Senior Research Fellow at Melbourne University. He is married to Anne, a professor of psychiatry who writes erotic fiction. They have two children. In 2007, Graeme completed his PhD in information systems and enrolled in the professional screenwriting course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He has made a number of short films and his screenplay, The Rosie Project, won the Australian Writers Guild / Inscription Award for Best Romantic Comedy Script in 2010. While waiting for The Rosie Project to be produced, he turned it into a novel which in June 2012 won the Victorian Premier's award for an unpublished fiction manuscript. Readers of The Rosie Project will know that Graeme Simsion has a first-class sense of humour. At professional conferences he has given addresses from on top of a ladder, dressed as a duck, and he once engaged a group of spellbound chartered accountants in community singing.
