Paul Murray to pen small screen adaptation of his Booker Prize-shortlisted work
The Day of the Jackal indie Carnival Films is developing an adaptation of Paul Murray’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Bee Sting for TV, Broadcast can reveal.
Murray will adapt his own work for screen after Carnival won the rights to the novel earlier this year in what was understood to be a highly competitive process.
Published in 2023, The Bee Sting is billed as an ambitious and gripping family saga, set in rural Ireland in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
Centring on the Barnes family, a once influential and wealthy family, the action looks at the individual characters’ aims to counter the financial difficulties they face. Patriarch, Dickie Barnes, runs a struggling collection of car dealerships and garages, inherited from his father, while his marriage to Imelda hangs from a thread. Straight-A student Cass is fast heading off the rails, PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully.
When a blackmailer with videos and photos that could upend him enters Dickie’s life, the family seems too distracted to understand the looming threat.
Besides being shortlisted for the Booker, The Bee Sting won the Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year and the Irish Book Awards Book of the Year 2023.
The project is in very early development with the Universal International Studios (UIS, a division of NBCUniversal’s Universal Studio Group) label, and is the latest in a series of high-profile book projects for the Downton Abbey producer.
News of the option comes less than a week after Carnival secured a recommission for its Sky and Peacock ratings smash The Day of the Jackal, inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s seminal 1971 political thriller novel.
Sarah Snook-fronted Peacock original All Her Fault, based on Andrea Mara’s novel of the same name, is due to deliver this year, while in September the NBCUniversal-owned producer won the rights to David Goodman’s debut novel A Reluctant Spy.
Last year, Broadcast revealed Carnival was teaming up with Peacock for an ambitious adaptation of Ken Follett’s epic historical novel Fall of Giants, the first in the author’s Century Trilogy, with Any Human Heart writer William Boyd penning the drama.
Carnival’s chief exec Gareth Neame and managing director Nigel Marchant will be speaking alongside UIS’s Beatrice Springborn and Margaret Schatzel at Content London (5 December) next week.
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