The Rosie Project is a 2013 novel by Graeme Simsion revolving around the fastidious geneticist Dr. Donald "Don" Tillman and his attempts to find a partner with the help of "The Wife Project." As he seeks a potential wife, Don meets Rosie Jarman, a free-spirited barmaid, who is trying to discover the identity of her absentee father. Hilarity ensues.
A sequel, The Rosie Effect was released in 2014. Sony Pictures has optioned the adaptation rights of the novel, although nothing else is known of the project. There is now a third book, The Rosie Result, about Don and his ten-year-old son.
Tropes:
- Badass Bookworm: Don is a genetics professor who knows aikido and karate. He was able to disable two bouncers at a restaurant after a debate regarding his not wearing a suit jacket.
- Beta Couple: Don's friends, Gene and Claudia. An interesting example in that their relationship has its own share of problems wholly unrelated to those of Don and Rosie.
- Gene Hunting: The Father Project is intended to find Rosie's biological father by DNA testing all the men her mother could've slept with. It turns out to have been Phil, the man who raised her, all along.
- Hollywood Autism: averted. Don doesn't have every autism stereotype going: he is an independent, successful professional who has a range of interests from science to cooking to martial arts, and, most importantly, he is a caring, compassionate person, a loyal friend, and, while Rosie initially assumes that he is 'incapable of love', successive books show him to be a loving husband and father, without becoming any less autistic.
- Several characters occasionally compare Don to 'Rain Man', using it either as an insult or a backhanded compliment depending on whether they regard him as an Idiot Savant or just an idiot, but Don isn't bothered by this, as he knows it isn't true.
- Also, while Don happens to be white, able-bodied, male and heterosexual (like the majority of autistic characters in fiction unless they're white, able-bodied, male and asexual), the third book has a wider range of autistic men, women and children, several of whom are gay. One character comments that no-one had even thought to ask whether she was autistic until she diagnosed herself using an internet quiz, because her unusual physical condition was what everyone noticed.
- Meaningful Name: Don (because he's a university professor) and Gene (because he's a geneticist, and someone who thinks that all his bad behaviour can be justified in terms of the instinct to spread one's genes as far as possible).
- In-universe version with Hudson. On discovering that he was going to be a father, Don had nicknamed the embryo BUD, short for Baby Under Development. When the baby is born, Don decides to update the name to HUD (Human Under Development), or, to make for a more euphonious-sounding name, Hudson. When Rosie points out that this implies that the baby is the son of a human who is still under development, Don counters that all humans, not just children, should be constantly under development, and Rosie concedes that this is certainly true of Don.
- The Casanova: Gene wants to sleep with at least one woman from every country. He keeps track using a map in his office.
- The Comically Serious: Don has trouble understanding sarcasm or making jokes, and his literal-minded approach leads to humorous situations.
- Transparent Closet: non-sexual variant - Don is 'in the closet' not about being gay, which he isn't, but about being autistic, even though everyone can see that he is 'not exactly average'. As another character, who is both gay and autistic, says, it's a lot easier to fake being heterosexual than to fake being neurotypical.
- Deadpan Snarker: Rosie.
- No Sense of Humor: Don.
