EXCLUSIVE: The Rachel Incident, the upcoming novel by Caroline O’Donoghue, is getting the TV treatment.
UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group, has optioned the rights to the novel, which is published on June 27 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
O’Donoghue is the author of YA fantasy All Our Hidden Gifts and The Rachel Incident is her first adult novel to be published in the U.S.
The books tells the story of Rachel, a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate, and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork City, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife.
“I’m so thrilled that UCP have decided to adapt The Rachel Incident, a story that is so personal, intimate and specifically Irish that it feels crazy to me that a major studio would be interested in it,” said O’Donoghue. “Every author dreams of getting their work adapted for screen and very few of them are given a golden ticket quite like this.”
