The Rosie Project is a must-read

Melburnian Graeme Simsion’s first novel, The Rosie Project, was sold to 30 countries for a collective sum of $2 million before it surfaced in Australian bookshops in early 2013, netting the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript en route.
     Both these achievements suggest the book is exceptional and it is, in the best possible sense of the word. From the minute you start leafing through the pages of the first chapter, chief protagonist, Don, hooks you in with his disarming, eccentric personality.

       It doesn’t take long to figure out that Don is to Asperger’s syndrome what George Clooney is to Hollywood, viz. poster-boy pin-up of gentlemanlike charm with foibles and tics of behaviour he tries his best to control… especially when he’s around Rosie.

“The insights into human behaviour, and the condition of Asperger’s, are profound.”

You could describe The Rosie Project as “just another love story”, but to do so would do this touching, amusing novel a disservice. Don may be outside the square, but he is not any the less lovable for it and his quest to achieve a semblance of “normality” is touching.      
      As one critic fittingly put it, this marvellous novel may be full of laughs, but it is also “a serious reflection on our need for companionship and identity.”
       Unsurprisingly, this book’s literary success was not “overnight”; rather, it had a long gestation and a great deal of refinement before coming to light in its present form.
        The result, I suspect, is that readers will be clamouring for more of Simsion’s light, deft touch as he interprets for us the human condition. ***

Upcoming review:
A lyrical, magical novel (see right) about identity, loss

and one's place in the world... set in freezing Siberia!