Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident is headed to the small screen, Deadline reports.
O’Donoghue’s novel, published Tuesday by Knopf, follows the friendship between Rachel and James, two young people living in Cork, Ireland. Rachel falls for a Victorian literature professor, and James agrees to try to help her catch his interest. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a sensational new entry in the burgeoning millennial-novel genre.”
In an interview with the Independent, O’Donoghue said her novel was inspired by nostalgia for the pre-pandemic days.
“I had to get back to a place in my head where it was joyful,” she said. “And what I went back to was a time when I was 20, the year before I emigrated [from Ireland to the U.K.], me and my best friend were living in this shitty little house and we just had the time of our lives. It became part of the novel that you can have a renaissance of the soul and really come alive, and be 20 minutes from your childhood home.”
The Rachel Incident is being developed for television by Universal Content Productions, the company that is also working on screen adaptations of Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy and Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao.
“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,” O’Donoghue said. “Every author dreams of getting their work adapted for screen and very few of them are given a golden ticket quite like this.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
