Justine Picardie's Daphne to be filmed

Again from Book2Book:

Bloomsbury Publishing is delighted to announce a film deal for Justine Picardie's forthcoming novel, Daphne, to be published in March 2008.

The option has been bought by Robert Fox, producer of the films - Iris, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal and executive producer of Closer and most recently the Golden Globe winning, Oscar nominated Atonement. Daphne will be his next project.

Fox's family had ties with the Du Mauriers and as a child Robert himself visited Daphne at Menabilly, Fowey, the house that would go on to inspire so much of her writing. Justine Picardie is thrilled to have a producer so in tune with this book and its history.

Daphne is published on March 3rd 2008, priced £14.99.

Synopsis:

It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel, written twenty years earlier. Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic bibliophile Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable. In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a fleeting courtship with a man considerably older than her, struggles with her PhD thesis. Her husband, still seemingly in thrall to his brilliant, charismatic first wife, is frequently distant and mysterious, and she can't find a way to make this large, imposing house in Hampstead feel like her own. Retreating instead into the comfort of her library, she begins to become absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery.

The last untold Bronte story, "Daphne" is a tale of obsession and possession; of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures; of love lost, and love found. It is a beautiful, original novel from the acclaimed author of "Wish I May".