Ridley Scott has purchased the rights to adapt John Boyne’s latest novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, for TV.

Scott’s production company, Scott Free Productions, has purchased the rights to Furies.

https://twitter.com/john_boyne/status/918546585335844869

Boyne indicated that money was not the driving factor in his decision to sell the rights to adapt his novel to Scott Free Productions.

“I never wanted to sell anything for the sake of it,” Boyne said. “You hope that it will be realised.”

And who better to bring Furies to the screen than Ridley Scott?

While the prolific director is predominantly known for his work within the sci-fi genre, with director’s credits for Blade Runner, Alien, Prometheus, and The Martian under his belt, he has also directed critically acclaimed films including Gladiator and Thelma & Louise.

The Novel

Boyne’s latest work is an epic gay novel that’s set in Ireland, takes place over the course of 70 years, and has been written to make readers “laugh and cry”.

The book’s blurb reads as follows:

“Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

In this, Boyne’s most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.”

The novel is broken up into ten chapters, each of which deals with a period of seven years in the protagonist Cyril Avery’s life.

According to The Times UK, Scott’s intentions are to create a ten-episode series, one for each chapter.

GCN Town Hall Talks

John Boyne recently spoke about his epic Irish gay novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies at the GCN Town Hall Talk on Queer Representations in Irish Writing this June.

There, he discussed the inspiration for his novel and the driving motivator that is sexual desire before reading a section of it.

Watch Boyne discussing his novel in the Facebook Live video of the Town Hall Talk below from about 45 minutes in: