‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company SunnyMarch has pre-empted the TV rights to Ambrose Parry’s new novel The Way of All Flesh, the first in a new historical series set in the medical world of Edinburgh in the 1840s.
Ambrose Parry is a pseudonym for a collaboration between internationally bestselling and award-winning author Chris Brookmyre and his wife, a consultant anaesthetist with 20 years’ experience, Marisa Haetzman.
The novel will be published by Canongate as its lead title in August 2018. International rights have already been sold in seven territories.
SunnyMarch’s managing director Adam Ackland and executive producer Claire Marshall went into exclusive negotiations for the book with Charles Walker at United Agents. SunnyMarch will be adapting the novel into a returning drama series.
Based on real historical figures, The Way of All Flesh is set in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh in 1847, a dual city home to brilliant advances in medical science and great poverty with a truly unsavoury, violent side. Medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned professor of midwifery, Dr James Young Simpson. It’s at Simpson’s thoroughly unusual clinic on Queen Street, where patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city, that Raven meets Sarah Fisher, officially housemaid and unofficially clinical assistant to Dr Simpson, determined to improve her station in life. After a string of mysterious deaths in the city, Raven and Sarah are propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld, where they will have to overcome their differences if they are to make it out alive.’
Via The Bookseller
The Book to Screen Club 