The Rosie Project
Don Tillman • Book 1
by Graeme Simsion
Why You'll Love This
A genetics professor who can't hold a conversation designs a 16-page questionnaire to find a wife — and somehow this becomes one of the warmest love stories you'll read.
- Great if you want: a neurodivergent narrator whose logic keeps upending your expectations
- The experience: breezy and funny with a genuine emotional gut-punch at the end
- The writing: Simsion's deadpan first-person voice is the whole engine — Don's oblivious precision is both the joke and the heart
- Skip if: you find quirky-protagonist romances predictable or cloying
About This Book
Don Tillman is a genetics professor who has never made it to a second date. Rather than accept defeat, he approaches the problem the only way he knows how: scientifically. His meticulously designed questionnaire — The Wife Project — is meant to filter out incompatible candidates with ruthless efficiency. What he doesn't account for is Rosie, who fails every criterion on his list and somehow keeps showing up anyway. At its heart, this is a story about what happens when the life you've optimized for turns out to be missing something you didn't know to measure.
What makes the book work so well is Simsion's decision to let Don narrate his own story in complete earnestness. Don doesn't know he's funny, which makes him genuinely funny. He doesn't realize he's changing, which makes his arc quietly devastating. The prose is clean and precise — it mirrors Don's logical mind without ever becoming cold — and the structure builds with the satisfying momentum of a very good plan going gloriously sideways. It's a novel that trusts its readers to feel what its narrator can't quite name.