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Graeme Simsion is a Melbourne-based novelist and screenwriter. The Rosie Project was the 2014 ABIA Book of the Year and has sold over three million copies worldwide. The sequel, The Rosie Effect, is also a bestseller. Graeme’s screenplay for The Rosie Project is in development with Sony Pictures.

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Copyright © Graeme Simsion 2016

The moral right of Graeme Simsion to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Angel Of The Morning – C. Taylor © 1967 EMI Blackwood Music Inc. For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 83 000 040 951) Locked Bag 7300, Darlinghurst NSW 1300 Australia. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

First published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

Book design by Text

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Hardback ISBN: 9781925355888

Paperback ISBN: 9781925355376

Ebook ISBN: 9781922253835

Creator: Simsion, Graeme C. , author.

Title: The best of Adam Sharp / by Graeme Simsion.

Subjects: Man–woman relationships—Fiction.

Dewey Number: A823. 4

The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

This book is—again—for my wife, Anne, my inspiration, collaborator and first reader.

It is also a nod to the music and musicians that contributed so much to the life of my generation. If you don’t know the songs in this book, I encourage you to download them and listen as you read: there is a playlist at the end.

Before the Deluge

If my life prior to 15 February, 2012 had been a song, it might have been ‘Hey Jude’, a simple piano tune, taking my sad and sorry adolescence and making it better. In the middle, it would pick up—better and better—for a few moments foreshadowing something extraordinary. And then: just na-na-na-na, over and over, pleasant enough, but mainly because it evoked what had gone before.

A day that began in my childhood bedroom in Manchester, boxed in by photograph albums and records, was always going to evoke the past.

My walk to the station, through streets grey with drizzle and commuters huddled into their coats and plugged into their phones, did not so much remind me of days gone by as stir a longing for them, for a summer under blue skies half a world away, where the music of boom boxes competed with the laughter of carelessly dressed drinkers spilling from the pub onto the footpath.

My route took me past the Radisson Hotel, once the Free Trade Hall and scene of a seminal moment in popular music. Seventeenth of May, 1966. A heckler shouts ‘Judas!’ to the young Bob Dylan, who has returned after the interval with an electric guitar, and he responds with a blistering rendition of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. My father was there, in the audience, eyewitness to music history.