EXCLUSIVE: Every book in the canon of British author Sarah Waters has been adapted for screen – except one. That’s about to change.
Deadline understands BBC Studios Fiction has optioned The Paying Guests, the 2014 book about a 1922 love affair that turns into a twisting crime thriller.
We hear In My Skin and Killing Eve writer Kayleigh Llewellyn, who is penning the upcoming BBC series The Dream Lands, is attached to adapt it as a series. No network or streamer is attached at this stage.
Here’s the plotline: “Set in London in 1922, The Paying Guests follows Frances Wray and her mother as they take in married lodgers Lilian and Leonard Barber. What begins as a clandestine, intoxicating love affair between Frances and Lilian spirals into a twisting crime thriller, culminating in a brutal murder and a nail‑biting court case.”
Waters, who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Women’s Prize For Fiction, is one of the most adapted authors working today. Previous adaptations of her books include BBC series Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, Andrew Davies’ Affinity, BBC telemovie The Night Watch and Lenny Abrahamson’s feature The Little Stranger. Fingersmith was also the inspiration for Park Chan‑wook’s The Handmaiden.
The Paying Guests will join a BBC Studios Fiction slate that includes the upcoming third season of Jimmy McGovern drama Time, which is set in a Young Offenders Institution and stars David Tennant and Siobhan Finneran.
BBC Studios Fiction was created last year, as we revealed at the time, with BBC Studios Comedy Productions boss Josh Cole at the top as Chief Creative Officer.
The label sits alongside BBC Studios Drama Productions, which makes long-running, continuing and returning series such as Casualty and Silent Witness.
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