The production companies of Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling are developing a television adaptation of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Variety reports.
Wong’s novel, published last month by Berkley, follows an elderly woman in San Francisco’s Chinatown who finds a dead body in the tea shop she owns. She keeps a flash drive that she discovers on the corpse, determined to track down the man’s killer. A critic for Kirkus called the book “literary comfort food in the guise of a quirky whodunit.”
Warner Bros. Television Studios bought the rights to the novel. The series will be produced by Harpo Films and Kaling International.
Sutanto’s 2021 novel Dial A for Aunties is also being adapted for the screen. Nahnatchka Khan (Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, Fresh Off the Boat) is developing the book as a film for Netflix; Sutanto is on board as an executive producer.
Sutanto announced the Vera Wong adaptation on Instagram, writing, “We were already at auction when we received news that THE Oprah had read Vera and loved it, and the way I screamed when I saw the email! Then I screamed again when THE Mindy Kaling sent a note to say how much she loved Vera. I mean...OPRAH. MINDY KALING. WHAT??! I am still in shock. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
