“Meet Don Tillman.

Don is getting married.

He just doesn’t know who to yet.

But he has designed a very detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect woman.

One thing he already knows, though, is that it’s not Rosie.

Absolutely, completely, definitely not.”

This is just a quick little post to say how much I enjoyed reading The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion whilst I was on holiday. It’s actually one of the books I saw being worked on when I was at Penguin, as it was going into its last stages of publicity, and my friend even got to meet the author!

To summarise, think a grown up version of  Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but about a hundred times funnier and just as heartwarming. I’m terrible at laughing aloud when reading and when reading this book, I literally found myself hysterically laughing to myself upon several occasions. The whole way through I could really imagine it as a Rom Com and at the end Simsion says that he originally wrote it as a screenplay which makes a lot of sense. I really hope that somebody makes this into a film; it would honestly be so hilarious and I would definitely see it.

The character of Don is pretty much just a more loveable version of Sheldon Cooper; both are scientists with clear undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome who take everything far too literally, and who both shun any form of human contact. Despite his annoying naivety and strict routines, I really grew to love Don by the end and felt that his character progression was woven so beautifully into the prose themselves.  I also enjoyed reading a book set in Australia, rather than the UK or America with all of their worn out clichés.

Overall, I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a lighthearted quick summer book. I read this in a day, not wanting to put it down because it was simply so funny and I look forward to what Simsion writes next. Hopefully the screenplay to the film.

Can love really conquer all in a geneticist’s mind?
Martin Wimmer / Getty