There’s a particular kind of novel that hands you a hero who cannot read a room to save his or her life. The Rosie Project is the gold standard. Don Tillman, a genetics professor who runs his meals on a fixed weekly rotation and treats finding a wife as a data problem, remains one of the most loveable narrators in modern fiction, largely because he has no idea he’s funny.
Graeme Simsion’s 2013 comedy sold over three and a half million copies and spawned two sequels, The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Result. The set-up: Don launches the Wife Project, a scientifically rigorous questionnaire to screen out anyone who is unpunctual, illogical, or fond of a drink. Enter Rosie, who is all three and then some, plus she’s on a hunt for her biological father and needs a DNA expert. You can guess where the logic leads. Don cannot, and that’s the joy of it.
So if you’ve finished the trilogy and you’re mourning Don, here are six books to fill the hole. I write socially adrift characters for a living, so consider this a recommendation from someone with a professional interest in people who don’t quite fit.
What makes a Rosie Project book work
The recipe looks simple, and almost nobody nails it. You need a narrator slightly out of step with everyone around them: too literal, too honest, too fond of a system. You give them a routine you could set your watch by. Then you introduce one person, or one death, or one poodle skewered on a garden fork, and you watch the routine buckle. The comedy comes from the narrator missing what the rest of us saw coming a mile off. The heartbreak comes from realising they see things we’ve gone blind to. Do it badly, and the character reads like a checklist of quirks: alphabetised spice rack, ended a relationship over a misused apostrophe, that sort of thing. Do it well, and you’d happily take a bullet for them.
The six to read next
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor lives by a rigid weekly timetable: work, frozen pizza, and two bottles of vodka to see her through a weekend in which she speaks to precisely no one. She has firm opinions on everything and the social skills of a house brick. Then a small act of kindness towards an elderly stranger who collapses in the street cracks her routine wide open. It took the Costa First Novel Award in 2017 and outsold every other hardback debut that year, and you’ll understand why by about page forty, when Eleanor submits to her first-ever bikini wax with the grim resolve of a woman defusing a bomb. Funny, then suddenly not, then funny again.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel drops you straight inside the head of Christopher Boone, fifteen, brilliant at maths, undone by the colour yellow and by strangers touching him. He finds his neighbour’s poodle killed with a garden fork and decides to investigate, narrating the whole affair with a logic so clean it quietly reorganises how you see your own family. What starts as a detective story becomes something much bigger and much sadder. Two decades on, it still reads like nothing else.
The Maid by Nita Prose
Molly Gray cleans rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel and finds genuine peace in returning a wrecked suite to a state of gleaming order. She cannot detect sarcasm, takes every instruction at face value, and misses social cues the way I miss the offside rule. When she wheels her trolley into a guest’s suite and finds Mr Black dead in his bed, her oddness lands her top of the suspect list. Nita Prose shifted more than two million copies of this in 2022, and Florence Pugh signed up to play Molly on screen. Cosy crime with a heroine you want to wrap in a blanket.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Maria Semple builds her 2012 novel almost entirely from emails, school memos and the odd emergency-room bill, which sounds like admin and reads like pure joy. Bernadette Fox, a once-celebrated architect turned Seattle recluse, wages private war on the other mothers at her daughter’s private school and outsources her entire life to a virtual assistant in India. Then she vanishes. Her teenage daughter assembles the paper trail to work out where her mother went. Sharp, gloriously misanthropic, and far warmer than it lets on.
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman’s Swedish curmudgeon patrols his housing estate every morning inspecting bins and bollards, seething at a world full of people who cannot reverse a trailer or recycle a jam jar correctly. He has decided to die. The universe, in the form of a family of new neighbours flattening his postbox with a badly reversed trailer, has other plans. Ove is the grumpy uncle of this whole family of books, and the softest once you crack the shell. He earns a full write-up here another day; treat this as your starter for ten.
Waiting in The Sky by Keith A Pearson
Since we’re on the subject of narrators who don’t quite belong in the world they woke up in, I’ll nominate one of my own. Simon Armstrong has spent nearly thirty years certain he’s an alien stationed on Earth, waiting patiently for his people to come and extract him. He keeps himself to himself, tolerates an antisocial cat named Merle, and files human behaviour under field research. Then he stumbles on a clue about who he really is. Readers have set it beside The Rosie Project, The Humans and Eleanor Oliphant, which is either flattering company or a bit of a cheek on my part, depending on your mood.
What the awkward ones know that the rest of us forget
Here’s the thing the best of these books understand. The character who cannot fake it is the one who tells the truth. Don measures a woman’s suitability with a questionnaire because he sincerely believes love ought to make sense. Eleanor says the unsayable because nobody ever taught her to lie politely. We spend our lives filing the edges off ourselves so we blend in at the barber’s and don’t alarm the neighbours, and then we hand our whole heart to the one person on the page who flatly refuses to. That isn’t an accident. It’s the entire point.
Where to go from here
If you like your outsiders written with warmth rather than pity, I’ve spent a decent chunk of my career on them. Waiting in The Sky is the obvious place to start: Simon, his cat, and a mission that turns out to mean something very different from what he thinks. And if you’d like that same tenderness pointed at grief rather than belonging, The Last Stop Video Shop follows Kevin Kershaw, on the achy side of fifty, into possibly the last video shop left in England, where an old VHS tape plays him a memory of his late mother that nobody ever filmed. Both will have you laughing in the first half and reaching for a tissue in the second. Consider yourself warned. If you want to go deeper on the subject, I’ve also written about whether some of fiction’s most famous misfits are autistic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Rosie Project part of a series?
Yes. Graeme Simsion followed it with The Rosie Effect in 2014 and The Rosie Result in 2019, completing the Don Tillman trilogy. The first book stands perfectly well on its own if you’d rather not commit to all three.
Do I need to like romance to enjoy these books?
Not really. Most of them use a relationship as the engine, but the true subject is loneliness and the slow, awkward business of letting other people in. If straight romance leaves you cold, you’ll very likely still love these.
Are these books about autism?
Some feature characters with autistic traits, though authors vary in how explicit they are. Don Tillman is never formally diagnosed in the text; Christopher Boone’s narration in The Curious Incident is often read that way. The books work as stories first, not case studies.
Which should I read first if I loved The Rosie Project?
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the closest match for tone and warmth. If you fancy something quieter and more British, try Waiting in The Sky. And for a cosy mystery twist on the same idea, pick up The Maid.
Are there British authors who write like this?
Plenty. Gail Honeyman is Scottish, Mark Haddon is English, and I’ve spent a good few novels in the same territory myself. British comic fiction has a long love affair with the loveable misfit, and shows no sign of ending it.